17.16 – Key Loggers

A key logger is both a form of malware and a cause of infection. One variant is a form of software which silently captures every keystroke entered by a user on a computer. This can include passwords and other valuable data. There will be some mechanism to save those keystrokes for later retrieval or send them to hackers remotely.

Some key loggers are hardware devices and require the criminal to gain physical access to the machine. They might look like a small dongle which sits between the computer and the keyboard cable, so tiny and out of sight that it is usually not noticed.