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Another Form of
Spyware: The Keylogger
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 |
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