stevenhickson

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  • Coder defeats Snapchat's anti-bot system in less than an hour

    by 
    Jon Fingas
    Jon Fingas
    01.23.2014

    Apparently, Snapchat's spot-the-ghost human verification tool isn't all that clever -- Steven Hickson has already written software that circumvents the anti-bot feature. His technique simply finds the best matches between Snapchat's sample pictures and a reference image. It's not flawless, but it's still accurate -- no mean feat for something that took less than an hour to program. Whether or not there will be a fix isn't clear. At this stage, the company will only tell us that it's making "significant progress" in locking down its chat service. While the statement hints that more security measures are on the way, it doesn't guarantee that Snapchat will defeat Hickson's code.