To keep your data secure, in addition to using SSL encryption for data transfer, we also use a variety of other methods in the Crystal CMS system to prevent hackers gaining unauthorised access to the control panel. The most obvious and publicly visible of these methods is our use of reCAPTCHA as an additional security layer for login to the control panel.

reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a free online CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs. For example, humans can read distorted text like the example shown below, but current computer programs can't:

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University. At the time, they developed the first CAPTCHA to be used by Yahoo. You can visit the reCAPTCHA project website here.

Other methods we use

At Crystal CMS we also use a variety of other more covert methods to detect and prevent automated attack by web bots and script programs. These methods are not publicly disclosed in order to make it difficult to reverse engineer and overcome these methods.