A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is the distorted text that a person must solve before a new account can be created. It used to be hard for computers to translate the text, but improvements in OCR (optical character recognition) technology have overcome that barrier. In some cases, spammers are believed to employ people in low-income countries to figure out the CAPTCHA in order to gain new e-mail accounts.

Once a new registration is complete, the account details are then e-mailed to a spammer. After too many account registrations, Google will eventually block the particular computer creating the accounts. The worm then removes itself, Dung wrote.

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