How to defeat a keylogger
Posted on July 27, 2008 at 5:34 am
Keyloggers, an abbreviation for Keystroke Loggers, are a rather nasty tool used by hackers to invade your privacy. This tool can secretly capture all the keystrokes you make, every single mouse click, and virtually everything you do on the computer, which, when you think about it, is very scary.
But keyloggers aren’t all bad - if you type ‘Keyloggers’ into Google, you’ll get hundreds of perfectly legitimate keyloggers, which aren’t made to be used as a hacking tool. But some people abuse these, and try to steal passwords for Paypal and other sensitive information.
Earlier I had written a post on how to detect keyloggers on your computer and bypass them using a reverse proxy server. Read it also if you’re sure you have a keylogger installed on your computer.
So, let’s assume that you have a keylogger - which hopefully you don’t - but, just assuming you do, let’s also assume that you can’t remove this keylogger. You’ve tried everything, scanned your computer multiple times, but you still can’t find it. So, how do you type your email passwords in without fear of being hacked? Here’s how.
Method 1: Online Keyboards
By using JavaScript keyboards, there’s no way any keylogger can pick up your keystrokes, which is re-assuring. However, it gets quite irritating using these, and it’s impossible to play games with.
Link to a online keyboard: http://www.codeproject.com/jscript/jsvk.asp
Method 2: Neo’s Safekeys
Neo’s Safekeys is a really small, but effective program. It only weighs in at about 8kb. You use it by clicking on the letters, and it types it into the white box at the bottom. You can then drag the password into the password field for your paypal, or email, or whatever you are trying to access. Perfectly safe.
A nice little extra feature of Neo’s SafeKeys, is that the program changes it’s width and height, as well as it’s placement on your screen each time upon load up, to trick Keyloggers. In addition to that, nothing is stored on your clipboard, which helps reinforce the security. It’s a handy little tool, and you can just keep it on your pen-drive if you have to use a computer you fear might be keylogged, like at internet cafes.
Link to the program: http://www.aplin.com.au/
Method 3: I Hate Keyloggers
I Hate Keyloggers is a program which basically disables the ‘hook’ mechanism many keyloggers use to get the information. However, sometimes it collides with other programs, and makes them not function properly (Or at all!), so it gets a bit difficult at times.
Link to download: http://dewasoft.com/privacy/i-hate-keyloggers.htm
Method 4: QFX Keyscrambler
QFX KeyScrambler encrypts what you’re typing, so the keylogger gets a bunch of mumbo jumbo, and decrypts again for you, so that you get exactly what you typed. It’s quite useful, but it’s a relatively large program, so just keep that in mind.
Link to download: http://www.inputsafe.com/download/KeyScrambler_Setup.exe
And there you have it! A good few methods which all work (and are proven to), so you should always be safe from keyloggers. Just mind that you make sure that you try to remove the keylogger instead of just going around it first, and only use these methods as a last-resort if you can’t remove your keylogger. Happy Safe Surfing.
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Does this give a complete fool proof solution for it?
Even windows on screen keyboard is also a good option. This post is very much useful for all users. Hence stumbled….
Isn’t this only valid for software keystroke loggers? I don’t think these methods will detect a hardware based logger like keykatcher
Not sure about keykatcher, but it might not work for some of them. Some better made software keyloggers, particularly ones made to target specific programs aren’t fooled by this. MMORPG forums often have the advice of pasting your password into the password box so they keylogger doesn’t detect any keystrokes typed into the window, so somebody made a keylogger that would detect the paste and get the password out of the clipboard instead.
Method 5: Install ubuntu (linux) on your computer, and use that instead of windows…. wubi is the easiest way of doing that.
In regards to onscreen keyboards, i stumbled accross a key logger the other day that had the option to screen capture an area around your mouse pointer when you clicked. So dont count on the screen keyboards
The Windows Screen Keyboard doesn’t help in the case of most keyloggers. however an online screen keyboard, as mentioned, must help.
or you could just reinstall windows and not click on sites that would install keylogger afterwards?
Wow this is going straight onto my thumbdrive! I hate using public computers, but when I have to, this is going to make me feel a lot better about logging into important accounts! Great post! Thanks!
These aren’t really meathods, just programs that help.
Why not post a method, such as telling people that when you were typing in a password (if you in the suspicious mood) do it like this.
Say the password is abc123. Type in ab124 then point your mouse in between the 2nd and 3rd letter (since all you can see is *****) and type “c” so now you have abc124. Then click at the end, move over one, type 3 then delete the last one (4). This would result in you having the password in the field, and the keylogger would recieve [(click) ab124 (click) c (click) (left) 4 (right) (backspace)].
Its harder to get a password out of that then out of [(click) username (click) abc123 (click)]
That is a method.
If on a website, you set it to remember your password, so you dont have to type it every time, is that OK or are there ways that the password can be stolen?