Saturday, July 7, 2012

Keylogging with Win32 Hooks

Keylogger (from Wikipedia):
Keystroke logging is the action of tracking (or logging) the keys struck on a keyboard, typically in a covert manner so that the person using the keyboard is unaware that their actions are being monitored.

It may seem strange, but there're many keylogging methods. People are getting more inventive as it comes to obtaining other people's secrets.
Protecting your secrets becomes challenging task. Even more than you can think of. Depending on your level of paranoia, perhaps you have to make sure that:
  • you're not using wireless keyboards
  • your keyboard installed directly into computer, and that there's no external device attached in between
  • you're using silent keyboard for preventing acoustic cryptanalysis attacks, and if you don't have one - you have to install random keypress sound generating machine
And I didn't even mention software-based threats!

Typical keylogger paranoid
Read the following excellent article, written by Nikolay Grebennikov, current CTO of Kaspersky Lab, where he outlines keylogger history including several publicized keylogging incidents.