Ever wonder why you are offered two separate words in the reCaptcha box? They call it a “free anti-bot service that helps digitize books”. What they really mean to say is that if you type in two words, one of the words will help you and the other word will help them.

The security implication of this is only one of the two words is the real test for anti-bot access. The other word is to help them fix issues in their digital book images.

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

One word they already know and the other word they are trying to decipher. If you type in two random words, you fail their test. If you type in one random word you have a good chance of passing the test as well as giving their database bogus information.

Many years ago as a graduate student I worked on a Xerox implementation for the blind. Fellow blind students would scan books and then give me the output files to correct and verify. I built simple scripts with WordPerfect to look for the number 5, for example, and substitute for the letter s. It was not terribly sophisticated (I am no linguist) but it was enough to save me the trouble of reading every word of every page.

The reCaptcha effort seems to headed in the same direction but using human labor as the solution instead of algorithms. Although I can see why they find this attractive, it begs a question of trust. It also begs the question of whether you want to bother putting in two words or gambling with just one. Try it and see.

The email message, as displayed by MalwareCity, has strange meter and language:

It is very important to keep the software on your iPad updated for best performance, newer features and security.

I would be suspicious at this point. Best performance? The next paragraph is even more obvious:

All you need is a computer with the latest version of iTunes and internet connection for updating your iPad software. It is important to say that during software update no data is lost.

The only software available from the link in this email, however, is for a Windows OS.

At this point, with the grammar and syntax flaws as well as the OS clue, you should know the email is an attack.

A victim of the attack will see Backdoor.Bifrose.AADY install a backdoor via explorer.exe that steals software license keys and passwords.

An information security post about poetry today, based on Valediction Forbidding Mourning by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”

So let us melt, and make no noise, [5]
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears;
Men reckon what it did, and meant; [10]
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

The above metaphor gave me pause. The point seems to be that an inter-planetary event has far more significance yet is less stressful than an event on earth. Donne clearly wants it to be this way, to make a point about quiet goodbyes.

I suspect that if you tell someone that a “sphere” event is likely (e.g. meteor strike) they will find as much or more trepidation than events happening on earth. On the other hand, Donne perhaps knew this and was really implying that the greatest impacts are the least frequent and thus should not be feared with the same intensity (profanation) as frequent ones of less severity. He continues:

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
‘Whose soul is sense’cannot admit
Of absence, ’cause it doth remove [15]
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assur’d of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. [20]

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so [25]
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, [30]
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, [35]
And makes me end where I begun.

Clever imagery within a poem of managing risk. The legs of the compass — one static as the other one roams and more erect when they are together — is a beautiful metaphor for continuity.

One of the most frustrating roles in security is being the one who has to rain on everyone’s parade. On the other hand, sometimes a dose of reality is required as Emo Phillips once quipped:

I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.