Keyloggers are especially useful for stealing usernames and passwords, bank and credit card numbers, and other sorts of personal information that people type every day. But keyloggers are most often used illegally to spy on people.Ī report by Trustwave security researchers revealed that malware known as 'Pony' was responsible for the theft of over two million usernames and passwords, many of them for popular sites such as Facebook, Gmail, LinkedIn, Twitter and Yahoo. Keyloggers do have legitimate uses, such as troubleshooting, training, analyzing employee productivity, and law enforcement surveillance. Hence the name, 'key logger.' The log file is intended to be read by a third party that is typically unknown, remote and malicious.
All of your keystrokes are stored, in order, in a log file. Keyloggers: What they Are and How to Defend YourselfĪ keylogger is a program that records everything that you type on a keyboard.
