Another Form of Spyware: The Keylogger
August 23, 2010 by Spyware Tool
Filed under spyware article
Did you know there was software that can run behind the scenes of your computer and log all of the keystrokes you type? It is known as the keylogger and it quietly just makes a record of all the keys you type and then later an attacker invades your computer and grabs the information. The idea is that the attacker can get this information and then another process can figure out if any information in it is of value such as passwords and credit card numbers. This includes the keylogger with the ability to record an email you created that you thought was confidential but in reality it can be sold to a third party if it contains valuable information.
Keyloggers work by software or there are hardware implementations too. But the software keylogging implementations are by far the easiest to infect a computer with. However their ease of infection also makes them easy to detect. The hardware keylogging implementations are much more covert and technically more complex than the software keyloggers. It would be very hard for a person to detect that there is a keylogger chip in their computer with onboard flash memory storage of the information that can be later retrieved by some external process. Keyloggers also get past the problem of data transmissions that are hidden by encryption as they record at the source—the source being the keys pressed.
Keyloggers continue to get more advanced and with their advancement comes a greater level of difficulty in detecting them. A very serious problem is that they could take months or longer to detect and during that time so much information was exposed. Just imagine the damage that could be done if some process found out all of your passwords, user names, credit card numbers, credit card expiration dates, bank accounts with routing numbers, e-mail contacts, and web browsing history. The exposure of information such as this can put a person at risk of identity theft.
These keyloggers can come in the form of an executable program (.exe) or dynamic link library (.dll) and can be started automatically when the system is booted. Some of the more advanced keyloggers like ProBot Activity Monitor and Perfect Keylogger have the following capabilities:
The ability to be deployed remotely
Can export information in text or HTML format
Can e-mail a log file to a recipient automatically
Are highly-invisible and practically undetectable
Can capture keystrokes if a user is not logged on
Can capture POST data from a web page (useful in capturing passwords)
Can record the time span when a person used the computer
Has the feature of capturing the text of applications active in the system
Keyloggers are not just for the purpose of illegal activities. They have many other useful purposes. Parents find them useful for monitoring the places on the internet their children visit. They can legally be used by the FBI to record a suspect’s activity without his or her awareness. This was put to the test with the Nicodemo Scarfo Jr. investigation. He was later indicted for gambling and loan-sharking but a key bit of evidence was when the FBI was able to break the encryption of a file stored on his computer by recording the keystrokes of the encryption password.
Article Source: http://www.spywaretool.com
