Keylogger and Tips on How to Overcome it

      
Keylogger comes from the word keylog, which is the abbreviation of keystroke logging, meaning the practice to record all activities on the keyboard. So keylogger itself is a tool to record what buttons are pressed in a sequence by the user. Like a double-edged knife, keylogger can be used for a positive purpose but also for a negative one. For its positive side, keylogger can be used by parents to supervise children's computing activities or as a parental control. While the negative side, it can be used by the unresponsible people to steal passwords and other important datas unnoticed.

Keylogger is divided into two kinds, namely hardware and software. Hardware-based keylogger is usually in the form of surveillance camera, or in the form of device which is installed between the keyboard and the computer. These tools will record every key pressed by the user. The software-based keylogger is a program that runs in the background like a virus program, which detects and records any keyboard input. In this discussion, we will focus on the types of software-based keylogger.

If you open the software-download sites and then search using the keyword keylogger, then you will get plenty of keylogger programs available. Even some of them are free. Although this program can be used positively for example to monitor the child's computer activity, but for us the computer users, of course, will get discomfort and worried when using public computers such as computers in the office or in a cybercafe, which is likely installed keylogger that can record passwords and other important datas. Therefore, it would be wiser if we know the preventive ways to get protected from keylogger crime.

Here I will point out a few tips you can do in order to computing securely from keylogger crime.

1. Using On-Screen Keyboard

If your computer using the Windows operating system, then you can use the On-Screen Keyboard program, the built-in program of Windows that displays a visual keyboard that contains all the keyboard standard buttons. You simply click each button image at the On-Screen Keyboard as the representation of the button pressing. This is very good to use when filling the username and password when you login at certain sites on the Internet such as Web sites that provide email services, and others.
To run this program, if you are using Windows Vista, click Start button > All Programs > Accessories > Ease of Access > On-Screen Keyboard. For users of Windows XP, click the Start button > All Programs > Accessories > Accessibility > On-Screen Keyboard.

2. Using KeyScrambler on  Firefox Browser

For those of you which like or used to surf the internet using Mozilla Firefox, to use the add-on KeyScrambler is one way to overcome keylogger. KeyScrambler encrypts every typing information so that the original typing will not be captured by the keylogger. You can get the KeyScrambler from the website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3383. Or you can search on Google.

3. Using anti-keylogger software

You can find an anti keylogger software via Google search engine or directly to the software-download sites such as Download.com, Softpedia.com, and others. However, if your computer has an antivirus software installed, then you do not need to worry. Because the keylogger belongs to the kind of program that will be detected and removed by antivirus programs. You just keep your antivirus program always updated.

4. Other ways

There is another tricky way to fool the keylogger program capturing passwords you type, ie by typing random letters inside the password, and then delete them back to return the original. For example your password is "royal", then you can write the first two letters of that password: "ro", and then type random letters like let's say "ytjhfj234", then connect it again with the rest of that password: "yal", and the last, conclude it with some random letters such as "rhgwc7". So the word that's detected by the keylogger will be like this: "roytjhfj234yalrhgwc7". Then you can delete the random part in order to get your password back by sorting and then pressing DELETE key, so the word will go back to "royal". This way is fairly unique but can be used as an alternative.

Hopefully this information is useful for you.

Related Posts: