Keyloggers - Is Someone Listening?

By Matt Williams

Keyloggers are a particularly risky type of spyware that records your keystrokes and sends the data to the developer or a third party. They then reconstruct your keystrokes and extract sensitive information such as account numbers, passwords, log-ins, credit card information and other financial data that you thought was private. Once they have your financial account numbers and passwords, they can clean out your bank account or run up your credit card!

Spyware is rampant these days and keyloggers are easily installed on unsuspecting computer user's systems. In addition to keyloggers that become installed through a Trojan horse type program, there are legitimate keylogger programs that are marketed to parents who wish to monitor their children's internet activities as well as to suspicious spouses and employers.

No matter if the keylogger was installed by an IT administrator or was unwittingly installed as part of a spyware application, it leaves you wondering, is someone listening?

You can't simply look in your installed programs list to see if a keylogger has been installed because they are designed to run in stealth mode. You'll find that there are two basic types of keyloggers, hardware and software keyloggers. A hardware keylogger is an actual piece of hardware used to record keystrokes and is typically installed by IT administrators or employers wishing to monitor their employees. A software keylogger is a program that records keystrokes, chat messages, and even snapshots of your computer's display.

So how do you know if someone is listening? Try a keylogger remover or an anti-spyware program. These programs are designed to sniff out keyloggers and protect your system from new keyloggers with updates. Not only should you be wary of malicious, random keylogger threats from the internet, you should be wary of keyloggers installed on your PC by people who wish to snoop on you.

A good anti-spyware scanner will find and remove any keyloggers running on your system. You will need to keep your program current with updates and scan your system regularly for new threats.

You can also check the Windows Task Manager for all running tasks by hitting Control + Alt + Delete. You can then look at all the tasks and research unknown tasks using a search engine. Another way to check for mysterious keyloggers is to go to the Start Button, choose Run and type in: msconfig. Then click the “startup” tab to see all programs that are set to start up each time you boot the computer. You can then compare the programs listed and learn more about them on the internet to see if they are legitimate startup programs or possible keyloggers.

Because keyloggers store the data in a log, you can also scan your hard drive in search of the most recently stored files. If you find a file that is continually updating itself, it could be a log for a keylogger program.

Remove Keyloggers