Hey everybody! This time around, I wanted to show you how to make the wired side of your Internet connection more secure. CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart." You have most likely seen CAPTCHA on websites where you have had to register. What this is used for is to keep bots and scripts from being able to register fake accounts or get to places without a live person being able to physically see the CAPTCHA image.

You have probably seen websites that will give you a registration code to enter. These are not as secure as websites using CAPTCHA. The reason is simple: Optical Character Recognition software or OCR for short. Most of you will recognize OCR as a piece of software that was bundled with your scanner. What OCR does is look at the text in an image and uses algorithms to try and determine what those words say. Hackers have added OCR to their arsenal, for reading registration codes.

So, what CAPTCHA does is create a type of registration code that uses letters of different sizes, colors and fonts, then makes the code curvy and irregular and puts patterns in the background of different colors and shapes. This makes it hard for the OCR software to determine what the code says. This means a person has to physically see the CAPTCHA images to type in what it says. Sometimes CAPTCHA can even be difficult for us to read. If this is the case, you can have the router regenerate a new CAPTCHA image using the button or give it a try and the router will regenerate one automatically if it is wrong.

So, now that we know why CAPTCHA is a good thing to have on our router to help protect the wired side of your Internet connection, let's get it set up. What you need to do is update the firmware on your router to the latest version. The firmware for CAPTCHA support for most of our routers was released around April and May of 2009 and the DIR-685 came with CAPTCHA pre-installed. But, we are going to need to make sure it is enabled.


If you log into your router and you see a CAPTCHA image, you are all set, but if you do not, you are going to want to first upgrade to the latest firmware. For instructions on how to upgrade your firmware without losing your settings, watch this video. Now that we have the latest firmware, all we need to do to enable CAPTCHA is log into our router and click the "Tools" tab (1) at the top of the page, select the Admin button (2)to the left of the page and then put a checkmark in the box (3) next to "Enable Graphical Authentication." Now just click the "Save Settings" button (4).


Now, when you go to log into your router, you should see the CAPTCHA image and the "Regenerate" button. That's all there is to it. Make sure you have secured your wireless, if you have wireless, so that you are completely protected. Well, that's going to do it for now.

If you want to watch the video that goes with this blog, click here.

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