11/18/2023 0 Comments Software that records keystrokes![]() ![]() Keyloggers are often found on computers in school or work settings as well, and in most jurisdictions in the United States they are considered legal if used for legal purposes. ![]() Many commercial keyloggers are marketed to parents who wish to monitor their children’s online activities, and this is generally considered legal if the parents own the computers being monitored. However, when the owner of a device installs a keylogger on their own system, things get murkier. Any of the above types of keyloggers could be installed by a malicious attacker who’s looking to steal your personal information or passwords. This one isn’t about how they work on a technical basis instead, it’s about their legality. Hardware keyloggers may be able to do this too, although sometimes their controllers must come physically collect them.īefore we move on, we should discuss one other kind of distinction we can make among different kinds of keyloggers. Keylogging software will occasionally send the information it’s harvested over the internet back to whoever’s controlling it, sometimes disguising the data to keep its activities hidden. Considerably simpler is the idea of third-party recording, which essentially consists of a camera surreptitiously pointed at your screen and keyboard.Īll of these different kinds of keyloggers have to save that data somewhere with hard drives much larger than they once were, it generally isn’t hard to find a place to stash it. One particularly esoteric version of keylogger, which has been tested in the lab, is an acoustic keylogger that can determine with uncanny accuracy what you’re typing just based on the noise your fingers make on the keys. There are also gadgets that can record the Bluetooth communication between a wireless keyboard and a computer. In addition to keylogging software, there’s also keylogging hardware, including recording devices that can be installed in the keyboard wiring itself, or a keylogging device might be built to look like a USB thumb drive and slipped into a port on the laptop or the computer. At the other end of the spectrum, there are screen scrapers, which don’t log keystrokes but rather use the computer’s screenshot capabilities to record onscreen text, and browser-level keyloggers, which can only detect text entered into a browser form (but considering how much of our online life takes place within a web browser, that’s still pretty dangerous). Kernel-level keyloggers are more difficult to create and install, but once they’re in place, they get their hooks into the operating system itself and are more difficult to detect and eradicate as a result. On Microsoft Windows, such keyloggers track GetAsyncKeyState or GetKeyState API functions and use a DLL to record the harvested data. These programs don’t have administrative privileges, but still manage to intercept information transmitted by the application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow different applications to receive keyboard input. Perhaps the most common type of keylogger software is a user mode keylogger, sometimes called API-level keyloggers. It’s possible for advanced keyloggers to: Some keyloggers go beyond just logging keystrokes and recording text and snoop in a number of other ways as well. (We’ll go into the details in a moment.) Since much of your interactions with your computer-and with the people you communicate with via your computer-are mediated through your keyboard, the range of potential information the snooper can acquire by this method is truly vast, from passwords and banking information to private correspondence. ![]() The basic functionality of a keylogger is that it records what you type and, in one way or another, reports that information back to whoever installed it on your computer. But there are legitimate, or at least legal, uses for keyloggers as well, as parents can use them to keep track of kids online and employers can similarly monitor their workers. Someone watching everything you do may sound creepy, and keyloggers are often installed by malicious hackers for nefarious purposes. But as you’ll see, there are different kind of keyloggers, and some record a broader range of inputs. The name is a short version of keystroke logger, and one of the main ways keyloggers keep track of you is by recording what you type as you type it. A keylogger is a tool that can record and report on a computer user’s activity as they interact with a computer. ![]()
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