how to protect yourself against keyloggers

But that means that the cybercriminal has to have physical access to the PC while you’re not present in order to plant the hardware keyloggers. Hardware devices can be embedded in the internal PC hardware itself, or be an inconspicuous plugin that’s secretly inserted into the keyboard port between the CPU box and the keyboard cable so that it intercepts all the signals as you type. Keyloggers come in at least two broad flavors-hardware devices and the more familiar software variety. There, the person operating the logging program can retrieve it all, no doubt sending it to third parties for criminal purposes.

You don’t know they’ve breached your computer and depending on what kind of keylogger it is, it can steal any passwords you’ve entered, periodically take screen shots, record the web pages you view, grab on to your sent emails and any instant messaging sessions, as well as sensitive financial information (such as credit card numbers, PIN codes, and bank accounts), and then send all that data over the network to a remote computer or web server. And they definitely do not own the device they infect. However, the concern about keyloggers is when malicious actors are behind them. And there are thousands of commercially available keyloggers on the Internet, which advertise themselves for just such a use. In all such cases, if the organization or person downloading and installing the keylogger actually owns the device, then it’s perfectly legal. Suspicious spouses are another market for keyloggers. The same goes for, say, parents, who want to monitor their children’s activities. Keyloggers are a common tool for corporations, which information technology departments use to troubleshoot technical problems on their systems and networks-or to keep an eye on employees surreptitiously.

Did you know that your keyboard could let cybercriminals eavesdrop on you? Or that they could watch you on your system camera? Or listen over your smartphone’s microphone? Welcome to the world of keyloggers, a particularly insidious type of spyware that can record and steal consecutive keystrokes (and much more) that the user enters on a device.Īlthough for our purposes, keyloggers operate in the context of malware, they are not always illegal to install and use.

How to protect yourself against keyloggers