But still you don’t know who is spying on your PC. He may be a professional hacker, cracker or he can also be any of your friend or your family member who has access to your PC.
How this all happens?
Keystroke logging is one of the hacking techniques that are mostly in use today by hackers. Keystroke logging (more often called keylogging) is the action of tracking (or logging) the keys struck on a keyboard, typically in a secret manner so that the person using the keyboard is unaware that their actions are being monitored. There are numerous keylogging methods, ranging from hardware and software-based approaches to electromagnetic and acoustic analysis. This all is done by special type programs called keyloggers.
Keyloggers are transferred to your PC through any website or software or through any hardware device.
Keyloggers come in two categories, legitimate and illegitimate.
Illegitimate keyloggers are used by hackers, crackers and criminals online, often in Eastern Europe. Most will be stopped by antivirus programs. If you ignore spam, and keep Windows updated, they shouldn't get in.
Legitimate keyloggers are often used by employers. They want to know what their employees are doing. Such keyloggers are also useful for parents. Parents can monitor their children’s activity log.
Unfortunately, keyloggers are frequently used by spies and other 'wronged parties' who want to collect evidence against the PC owner. If you think that your PC might be susceptible, you have to find and remove keyloggers so that you can use the Internet and other functions in privacy again.
How to Detect & Remove Keyloggers?
The presence of spyware is typically hidden from the user and can be difficult to detect. Some spyware, such as key loggers, may be installed by the owner of a shared, corporate, or public computer intentionally in order to monitor users. There are 3 different ways to get rid of keyloggers.1. Updating your Anti-Spyware or Anti-Virus or Using KL-Detector
Updating the Anti-virus or Anti-spyware, installed on your PC, is one of the ways to detect keyloggers in your PC. When you find keyloggers you can easily delete them. Free versions such as Spyware Doctor and AVG might be able to find them, but you are better off with an inexpensive paid version such as Webroot Spy sweeper. These will be able to find more cleverly hidden keyloggers so you can make your PC safe again.
KL-Detector v1.3 is also very beneficial freeware software to detect Keyloggers from PC. It works by scanning your local hard disk for any log file created during the monitoring process. Most keyloggers will eventually save the recorded data into a location in the hard disk. KL-Detector will inform you of such log file. This way, the program can detect all keyloggers, both known and unknown. Use KL-Detector to detect keylogger in public computer before you enter your password, credit card info, etc.
2. Manual Detection
We’re looking for third-party software, which is usually referred to as remote control software or virtual network computing (VNC) software. First, the easy thing to do is to simply check in your Start Menu All Programs and check whether or not something like VNC, RealVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC, LogMeIn, GoToMyPC, etc is installed. If you find such a program remove that.So in order for these third-party apps to connect to your computer, they must come through a port, which has to be open on your computer. You can check all the open ports by going to Start Menu and then open Control Panel
Now click on System and Security
Then Windows Firewall and make sure it turns on
Now go to Windows firewall Exceptions by clicking Allow a program or feature through Windows Firewall
You’ll see a list of programs with check boxes next to them. The ones that are checked are “open” and the unchecked or unlisted ones are “closed”. Go through the list and see if there is a program you’re not familiar with or that matches VNC, remote control, etc. If so, you can block the program by un-checking the box for it!
There is also another way to detect keylogger and that is Windows Task Manager Processes.
Simply start Windows Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Delete buttons together or through the taskbar as shown in figure.
After starting Windows Task Manager go to the Processes tab you’ll see a column titled User Name.
Scroll through all the processes and you should only see your user name, Local Service, Network Service, and System. Anything else means someone is logged into the computer!
3. Email & Web Site Monitoring
To check whether your email is being monitored is quite simple. Always, when you send an email from Outlook or some email client on your computer, it has to connect to the email server. Now it can either connect directly or it can connect through what is called a proxy server, which takes a request, alters or checks it, and forwards it on to another server.
If you’re going through a proxy server for email or web browsing, than the web sites you access or the emails you write can be saved and viewed later on. You can check for both and here’s how.
For Firefox, go to Options, then Advanced. Click on the Network tab and click on Settings.
If the Proxy Server box is checked and it has a local IP address with a port number, then that means you’re going through a local server first before it reaches the web server. This means that any web site you visit first goes through another server running some kind of software that either blocks the address or simply logs it.
This is how you can detect and remove keyloggers from your PC. It is the need of time to be updated in order to make sure your system is fully secured from such a sharp spywares. So check it now. May be you are being monitored by someone but you don’t have any knowledge about that.