The spies watching while you type

The Sun, 17.03.06: The computer criminals who tried to steal money from Sumitomo Mitsui bank used a tried and tested technique to gather confidential data from the financial institution. As its name implies keylogging is all about recording every key that someone presses when using their computer. It is a great way to discover confidential information such as login names, passwords and answers to security questions that people use to get access to online bank accounts, corporate systems and websites. Keylogging has been around almost as long as computer keyboards, and it has been used by some programmers to help debug code they have written. Some firms use keylogging software to monitor staff productivity and some parents use it to keep an eye on what their kids do with the home PC.

More recently many computer viruses, such as Mydoom and Gaobot have keylogging programs built-in that try to gather personal details from the machines they infect. More recently keylogging has been turning up in so-called spyware programs created by computer criminals to steal information that can be used to carry out identity theft or to empty bank accounts. Spyware bearing keyloggers can infect a Windows PC if it is used to visit the wrong website. Anti-spyware firm Webroot reports that 15% of the machines it tested for malicious programs have keyloggers on them. On average, it claims, PCs in firms have almost 18 unwanted pieces of software on them - mainly spyware.

There are also hardware keyloggers that plug into a port on a PC and record everything that is done to that machine while the device is in place. With both software and hardware keyloggers, the hard part is getting the data back to those that want to use it for criminal purposes. "A criminal could one day turn up as a cleaner, having gone through the extensive vetting process, and put one on a PC. The next day they could go and retrieve it " said James Kay, officer at security firm Blackspider. The gang could also have written a virus containing a keylogger specifically to target the bank. As many firms worry most about viruses that hit thousands of machines, ones that appear in low numbers might go un­noticed. Often, such keyloggers hide information on a corporate network in very obscure places such as printer spools to make the stolen data hard to spot.

THE NEW YOURK TIMES, 23.01.06.

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 696