Techie Inspire – The Technology Blog
A keylogger is perhaps the most dreaded kind of spyware that exists. Not only does it function as computer and internet monitoring software, it also holds great potential to track out your credentials and passwords to pass on to malicious third parties and hackers. What some people may still not get is that a keylogger quite literally tracks or ‘logs’ every ‘keystroke’ that physically happens on a computer and hence can track all that you have done from writing in a web address on the address bar to what conversations you have on chat forums with your contacts. A keylogger can hence note down your encryption keys as well as your passwords, gaining access to whatever data you may have thought as protected and secure.
Obviously, to ensure security as well as privacy on your system, be it a family PC that anyone coming in to your home could access or your personal laptop that could get intercepted and accessed simply at your workplace, you need to know how to detect a keylogger. But that doesn’t mean you need to resort to super expensive anti-spyware and anti-keylogger, instead you can use these easy ways to figure out whether one is installed in your system or not.
1. Manually check the task list. To get to the task list you need to simply press ctrl+alt+del on your Windows. Look through the tasks and if find something you aren’t sure of, don’t let it be. Investigate it and Google the task to know whether there is any association to stealth software.
2. Check out the startup tasks. The system configuration tool will allow you to gauge which tasks are loaded right at startup. You just have to type ‘msconfig’ in the run box. Examine which tasks are running and if they seem to be unnecessary or you can’t figure out what they are, investigate them further to make sure it isn’t a keylogger springing into action the moment your system starts.
3. Scan the hard disk. Look closely into the most recent stored files. If you see any files which are continuously updating then specifically look into those. The chances that these are log files are pretty good and so you’ll be able to access them and know whether there is a keylogger installed in your system or not.
4. Run whatever antivirus you have. There is always a possibility that the antivirus you are using may pick up on the keylogger. Usually keyloggers do not disrupt or corrupt files but if the keylogger has more than one function and is part and parcel of a virus then your antivirus may be able to detect it.
5. Download a keylogger detector. Of course, some may not have the patience or the tech capabilities to even bother with these easy simple steps. For those there are a multitude of anti-spyware and software utilities to check out. One can start with Spybot S&D which checks for some specific and notorious keyloggers.
Follow out these simple steps and hopefully you’ll get enough hang of it to keep yourself safe from possible keylogger infiltration as well as avoid future ignorance on the matter.
Author Bio: James Clark has been playing with his words and spinning out one informative piece after another on computer spy software along with iPhone Spy for a while now. His work is about all things technology related, especially when it comes to pcs.
