Spammers employ stripper to crack CAPTCHAs

A series of photographs shows "Melissa," no relation to the 1999 worm by the same name, with progressively fewer clothes and more skin each time the user correctly enters the characters in an accompanying CAPTCHA (Completely Automatic Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), the distorted, scrambled codes that most web-mail services use to block bots from registering hundreds or thousands of accounts. Spammers rely on web email accounts because they're disposable; by the time filters have blocked the address, the spammers throw it away and move on to another.