Anyone who has spent time online is familiar with CAPTCHAs-they pop up between you and your bank account, email, or other websites. They are only a slight annoyance when you are casually browsing the internet, but when you are working on something very important that may be urgent, such as web scraping, they are causing big disruptions. For businesses and enterprise researchers, CAPTCHAs can be especially problematic in interrupting digital research and reducing efficiency. That would make the whole process inefficient if one bot happens to get stuck on a CAPTCHA and it would also waste a great amount of your time and effort. And this is where the solution of proxies comes into play. Proxies will let the users bypass such roadblocks and give access to blocked websites or programs, ensuring smoother workflows. In this article, we will see what a CAPTCHA proxy is and how it can help you avoid CAPTCHAs, so you can maintain productivity in your daily online activities.
What Are CAPTCHA Proxies?
Performing extensive research across numerous websites can easily get your IP address blocked, thus bringing your work to a standstill. CAPTCHA proxies are created to prevent this from happening by helping you get through the anti-bot security measures. A CAPTCHA proxy will instead save you from the headache of CAPTCHAs by providing solutions that can be easily handled by bots or programs. This kind of proxy is designed to make CAPTCHA tests fast and easy to solve for your automation tools, thus keeping your research or scraping continuous.
There are different types of proxies, including data center proxies and residential proxies, which come with various merits. Data center proxies are normally cheaper, but, compared to residential proxies, they perform worse in beating CAPTCHAs. Residential proxies obviously offer better results because they are able to mimic real human activity and this would, in turn, make the websites think that the bot or program accessing them is a human user.
How Do CAPTCHA Proxies Work?
You might ask yourself why Google accounts are such a big deal when it comes to getting around a CAPTCHA, for example a Google reCAPTCHA. Well, the reason lies in how Google decides if a person should see a CAPTCHA or not. Before serving up the challenge, Google first checks whether the session is associated with a trusted account and to determine if the account is alright they look at the age of the account, its activity and reputation of the associated IP address.
Moreover, if you want to bypass the CAPTCHA system, you should assign a unique proxy to each of these Google accounts. However, that's not all, you should also surf the web and watch youtube videos to convince Google that you are actually a real user. Once this trust is created, Google will allow one-click CAPTCHA passes, which means that your bot won't have any kind of disruption when you are trying to break through these CAPTCHAs.
What Are CAPTCHAs and What Types of CAPTCHAs Exist?
CAPTCHAs, or Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, are challenges on the Internet that let the system decide whether you are a human or an automated program or a bot. These type of systems are very easy to be performed by humans, but for a computer they pose a harder challenge and that's why they are a pretty efficient tool against spam and automated abuse on websites.
The main goal of CAPTCHAs is to block bots from executing this kind of undesired activity on a website, such as posting spam, scraping, or running some kind of an automated attack. While they are pretty good for web security, they still make things kinda difficult for people who want to perform valid automated research or data gathering.
There are several types of CAPTCHAs out there that challenge bots in a variety of ways. Some common types include:
- Letter Recognition: A sequence of distorted letters and numbers is presented, and the user is asked to type them in. The distortion makes it virtually impossible for the bots to recognize the characters.
- Image Recognition: Programs like Google’s reCAPTCHA employs images that ask the user to click on specific objects in that image. For example, motorcycles, crosswalks, etc. And because of the intricacy of the recognition in an image, it is pretty difficult for bots to recognize those images.
- Social Media Logins: Log-ins through social media have recently been employed by many websites as a way of adding security to the log-in process. These types of CAPTCHAs are used less frequently because most people are hesitant to give out their social media information.
- Math Problems: This sort of CAPTCHA shows some simple mathematical equations, like 2 + 3 = 5. It is pretty easy for humans but hard for bots to interpret and calculate.
- Invisible CAPTCHAs (Honeypots): These CAPTCHAs are hidden from human users but placed in the website’s code. Bots interacting with these hidden elements reveal themselves and are blocked, while humans remain unaffected.
- Time-Based Checks: In these types of CAPTCHAs, it calculates the time a user needs to submit a form. Normally, bots fill out forms instantly, whereas for humans, it takes some more time. So, quick form submissions are flagged as bot activities.
How to Bypass CAPTCHAs
Avoiding CAPTCHAs starts with making sure that they aren't triggered at all. A lot of security systems are only triggered when a website thinks a user is acting suspiciously-unlike a human. If you can make your web scraping efforts seem more organic and human-like, then you will have a much better chance of avoiding them. Below are some of the most best methods that can help you bypass CAPTCHAs:
- Implement Rotating Proxies
Using rotating proxies is one of the easiest and most effective way to stay under the radar. This is because CAPTCHAs monitor how many times the same IP address is used in a short time frame. Every time you make a new request using rotating proxies, your IP addressess from the proxy are switched or you can customize them to switch at a set interval, and this makes it more difficult for a CAPTCHA system to recognize bot activities.
However, these rotating proxies come in 2 different types and these are datacenter and residential. Rotating datacenter proxies are much cheaper, but with them, you are more likely to don't avoid CAPTCHAs, since websites tend to flag non-residential IP addresses. On the other side, rotating residential proxies will significantly keep you under the radar, as they appear to be real users' IP addresses, and this way your bot will seem much more as a human. Another powerful way to avoid CAPTCHAs is to make your bot's actions on the site look like they are coming from an actual human. This means, of course, randomizing how much time is spent on each page and also how it interacts with the website. Using tools like Puppeteer, you can program your bot to move the mouse, scroll and click around the page you are on in a more natural way. By randomizing these behaviors, you can avoid being detected completely.
Honeypots are traps that can be hidden on a website. They are often invisible to a normal user, but, in case a bot interacts with them, this trap will be triggered. To handle this, make sure your bot is set to check the visibility of any element on the page before interacting with it. If it is hidden or not displayed, most likely this is a honeypot, and your bot should skip it to avoid getting blocked.
Conclusion
We know that CAPTCHAs can be very frustrating, especially when you are doing an important research. But with the right proxies, you will stay far from these roadblocks. High-quality tools, like rotating residential proxies provided by Anonymous Proxies, keep your IP secure and make you avoid the necessity of solving all of these annoying CAPTCHAs. Data center or ISP proxies are also great solution if residential proxies are not a necessity for your purpose. They work pretty well for tasks like CAPTCHA farming, where traffic usage can be huge.
