Keyloggers

Keyloggers can be a real problem for your computer. A keylogger, also known as keystroke recorder, is a piece of stealth software installed on your computer, in order to spy on you. It does its spying through silently recording your keystrokes in a file. Due to this type of monitoring, all your emails, documents, usernames and passwords entered, even your own credit card number etc., are being recorded and can be disclosed to other people - the ones that installed the keylogger on your computer.

Keyloggers are both a security issue and a privacy issue. While other members of your family may use them to spy on you, which at times can cause a lot of problems to the person being monitored in this fashion, it may also be used to retrieve your usernames and passwords, as well as banking details etc. The person that has installed the keylogger without your knowledge, will then use the backdoor he/she used to get into your computer, to download your keystrokes - or even get it directly from your computer, if it is directly accessible. And in this way, a lot of your personal information ends in the hands of this person, and bad things start happening for you.

A keylogger will usually appear in Task Manager under windows, so you may want to check the task list and perform an internet search on filenames. Many keyloggers are being detected and removed by antivirus and anti-spyware programs, but not all of them - simply because they are so easy to construct that even people with brief development experience can make a keylogger. In most cases your computer will experience no performance degrading if a keylogger is installed, so the user will hve no clue that his keystrokes are being silently recorded by the keylogger.

To protect yourself from these problems, use anti-virus and anti-spyware programs that monitor startup programs, and make sure you protect these programs with a configuration password so nobody can bypass detection of keyloggers. You may want to install Windows Defender and startup monitors like WinPatrol for example. Perform a security check on your computer, as often as possible; change your passwords from time to time, and make sure nobody else can log on into your computer while you are not in front of it. For further protection, use a screensaver password so nobody can touch your computer and install a keylogger while you are away from it, even for a short time.