Has CAPTCHA been captured?

CNet is reporting that spammers have hijacked YouTube's email-a-friend feature to send out phishing emails. The thing I found most notable in the article is the reference to software that automatically decodes and defeats CAPTCHA. This is a new, and troubling development for anyone who uses viral marketing or web forms.

CAPTCHA is a system that requires a web visitor to retype a set of letters into a form field in order to submit the form. Those letters are presented in a somewhat distorted or garbled image. The idea is to prevent automated scripts from being able to hijack the form. From an online branding perspective, the email-a-friend forms, blog comment forms and contact forms that CAPTCHA protects are critical to developing an effective online brand conversation. If these systems cannot be adequately protected, we may lose some of our most effective tools for online branding and marketing.

If CAPTCHA is indeed in danger, my question to ponder is: "what will take its place?" What type of system can simultaneously be easy to use for website visitors, while being difficult or (improbably) impossible for the hackers and spammers to get around?

Leave a comment. I think this is an important discussion to have now, before our online forms become as compromised as our junk mail folders already are!