Tag: privacy

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It’s your first day on the job. You walk in and sit down to mentally prepare yourself for the laundry list of tasks ahead. While seated at your keyboard, you notice there is a camera installed in the corner of the room pointing at you.

Feeling a little unsettled you look back at your computer keyboard and before you begin to type. You get this eerie feeling of something or someone watching you from all devices.

The camera, the webcam, and even the keyboard feels like they’re watching, and you are not too sure if what you are feeling is real. Let me script for you how this may be your reality.

Local Private Eyes

You understand how the camera and webcam could be the ones watching your every move. At some point or another, it’s been reported in the news, but to spout that your keyboard can be watching as well, now that might be a thing of nonsense.

You could say one is being unreasonably paranoid. Let me introduce you to a device called a “keylogger”. You may have heard it go by other names such as keystroke logger or keygrabber.

Keyloggers are tools used to capture all your interactions with the keyboard. This means everything you type is recorded and stored for later evaluation. This includes all the questionable websites you visited during the duration of your shift. We’re all looking at you nudemidgetcowgirlsfromouterspace.com.

For Good, Bad, and the Dark-net

The use of keyloggers has been used for both good intentions and malicious ones. For good intentions, this involves things like parents installing a keylogger to monitor their child’s screen time. Although I don’t know of any parents doing that nowadays since we’re just happy to not hear them crying about anything. A silent and preoccupied child makes a happy parent.

Another good intention, though questionable, is companies have been known to use keyloggers to monitor employee productivity, as you would have imagined, yes, the overlords may watch you to ensure that you are in fact working. And finally, IT (Information Technology) departments can use keyloggers for troubleshooting problems with a device.

So, with all of these “good intentions” (minus the company part depending on how you look at it), you may be wondering what the bad or malicious ones are. Unauthorized personnel will use keyloggers to, not only be like Sting from the Police watching every move you make but later sell your information on the dark web or hijack your life if they want.

Again, you’re a somebody and that means every person on the dark net doesn’t mind being you. Whether you choose to believe it or not your information has value.

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Connection via Co-worker

So how would something like this work? This is usually done by social engineering but you’re going to be highly disappointed to know that the installation of such a device is as simple as inserting a USB (Universal Serial Bus) thumb drive.

An example of this might be you’re in your office and Eric from accounting comes in to let you know that the big boss wants a word with you, so you head out to the big boss. If for some reason or other, you leave Eric in the office he can then go to your computer, hook up a device to the plugin slot for your keyboard, and connect your keyboard plugin to the keylogger device.

From there, all the information is ready to be recorded. There are other means outside of using this tactic. The use of web page scripts provides you with an infected link leading you to a malicious website where the software will download to your computer for the keylogger.

Phishing offers the same tactic, but it is delivered to your email instead, this could be where you see an email featuring the classic “click on the link if you want to marry your Russian princess” or prince. Just so you know, Z-Daddy doesn’t judge, love is love.

And finally, unidentified software is downloaded, this may also be known as “drive-by downloading”, again it’s not what you think, computer nerds aren’t driving around firing malicious code from the side of the car as they go by. This occurs when you visit a website like nudemidgetcowgirlsfromouterspace.com and a file is downloaded without your consent.

Watching Overall

Now while keylogging has some good and bad use cases, let’s be honest, no one likes to be watched without their consent. There may be a niche few who don’t mind because they feel as though they have nothing to hide. However, having this knowledge is important in protecting or simply figuring out if “Big Brother” or another interested party is viewing what you do.

A few ways of confirming are; if your browser is operating sluggishly or slower than normal, if there is a lag in keystrokes or cursor movements, or if your cursor disappears randomly during movement.

Physically, you could inspect your plugins by unplugging them and checking if a questionable device is seated in any of the USB slots. For digital or online protection, avoid visiting or downloading software from unknown trusted sources, if you receive an email from Eric with an attachment saying, “Good times are to be had here, click and download for more,” keep a close eye for grammatical or spelling errors and crosscheck with Eric as that may not have been him.

Always keep an understanding that your personal information is extremely valuable to an attacker. If you have massive debt, it’s not a problem, they’ll get you more and if you have no debt, that’s also not a problem, they’ll find you some.

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Do you feel like there is something I may have missed with keyloggers? Script a comment below.