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Archive for May 3rd, 2010

A keylogger is a program that runs in your computer’s background secretly recording all your keystrokes. Once your keystrokes are logged, they are hidden away for later retrieval by the attacker. The attacker then carefully reviews the information in hopes of finding passwords or other information that would prove useful to them. For example, a keylogger can easily obtain confidential emails and reveal them to any interested outside party willing to pay for the information.

keyloggers can be either software or hardware based. Software-based keyloggers are easy to distribute and infect, but at the same time are more easily detectable. Hardware-based keyloggers are more complex and harder to detect. You may not even know, your keyboard could have a keylogger chip attached and anything being typed is recorded into a flash memory sitting inside your keyboard. Keyloggers have become one of the most powerful applications used for gathering information in a world where encrypted traffic is becoming quite commonplace.

The ability to detect a keylogger becomes more difficult as technology advances. Without you even noticing, they can violate your privacy for months or even years. During that time frame, a keylogger can collect a lot of information about the user it is monitoring. A keylogger can potential obtain not only passwords and log-in names, but credit card numbers, bank account details, contacts, interests, web browsing habits, and much more. All this collected information can be used to steal user’s personal documents, money, or even their identity.

A keylogger might be as simple as an .exe and a .dll that is placed in a computer and activated upon boot up via an entry in the registry. Or, the more complex keyloggers, such as the Perfect Keylogger or ProBot Activity Monitor have developed a full line of dangerous abilities including:

” Completely invisible in operationg and undetectable in the running processes list
” A kernel keylogger driver that captures keystrokes even when the user is logged off
” A remote deployment wizard
” The ability to create text snapshots of active applications
” The ability to capture http post data (not limited to passwords and logins)
” The ability to timestamp record workstation usage
” Text log file and HTML exporing
” Automatic e-mail log file delivery

Of course, illegal use is not the only reason to deploy keyloggers. Many other purposes have arisen. Parental control of your children is one such use, as you may monitor the web sites they are visiting. They have been actively used to prevent child pornography and avoid children coming in contact with dangerous elements on the web.

Additionally, in December, 2001, a federal court ruled that the FBI did not need a special wiretap order to place a keystroke logging device on a suspect’s computer. The judge allowed the FBI to keep details of its key logging device secret (citing national security concerns). The defendant in the case, Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., indicted for gambling and loan-sharking, used encryption to protect a file on his computer. The FBI used the keystroke logging device to capture Scarfo’s password and gain access to the needed file.

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