Google has introduced a new version of its reCAPTCHA verification tool to detect abusive traffic on websites without user interaction.
The search engine giant uses reCAPTCHA to test that visitors on a website are humans, and not bots. The latest reCAPTCHA version, reCAPTCHA v3, will change the way websites test human vs bot activities. Rather than showing a challenge, it will return a score, allowing users to choose the most suitable action for the website.
“With reCAPTCHA v3, we are fundamentally changing how sites can test for human vs. bot activities by returning a score to tell you how suspicious an interaction is and eliminating the need to interrupt users with challenges at all. reCAPTCHA v3 runs adaptive risk analysis in the background to alert you of suspicious traffic while letting your human users enjoy a frictionless experience on your site,” wrote Google in a blog post.
When Google launched v1 of this service, users were asked to read distorted text and type that into a box. For improved user experience and security, the reCAPTCHA v2 was launched. Half of users could pass the v2 just with a click.
reCAPTCHA v3 comes with a new concept called ‘Action’, which is a tag that website owners can use to define key steps of a visitor’s journey. They can enable reCAPTCHA to run its risk analysis in context.
Google said that the new version doesn’t interrupt users, hence the website owners should add it to multiple pages.
“In this way, the reCAPTCHA adaptive risk analysis engine can identify the pattern of attackers more accurately by looking at the activities across different pages on your website,” said the company.
It will provide the site owners a score between 0 to 1 to decide the suspiciousness of an interaction. This score can be used to set a threshold to determine whether a user is let through or if further verification is needed.
The score can also be combined with user profiles or transaction histories. Lastly, site owners can use reCAPTCHA score as a signal to train machine model to fight abuse.
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“In short, reCAPTCHA v3 helps to protect your sites without user friction and gives you more power to decide what to do in risky situations,” added Google.
