Concept in Definition ABC
Miscellanea / / July 04, 2021
By Guillem Alsina González, in Sep. 2017
When it comes to doing harm, human imagination is very prolific, and we have examples of it just by opening the television and watching the news.
The malware It is another of those fields in which the twisted human imagination is demonstrated in practice, There are different types of malicious programs, depending on what the cybercriminals.
Once a device has been breached, specific variants of the device are required. malware depending on what you want to achieve, since a generic one that would do everything, would load the system resources that would be easily discoverable, which is the last thing users want. cybercriminals.
If, for example, a criminal's intention is to steal, he will need access to bank accounts, protected by a password or PIN. Similarly, to illegally access an account of email or storage in the cloud for the realization of spam or other illegal practices, you will also need access to the account username and password.
How to know the username and the configuration and access data is usually relatively simple, the crux of the question for the criminal lies in how to get the password.
If this has not been achieved through an attack on the server, and since the communications between the client and a server on any app minimally serious are encrypted, the solution more logicQuick, easy and direct, it is spying on what the user types when accessing their account.
Visually, that is, recording or photographing the screen of this when it works, it does not serve us, since you will have already seen that when we enter any service on-line, the field of password it does not show what we are typing, replacing the characters with asterisks or periods.
The cybercriminal is left with one option: to intercept all the keys that the user presses, and this is precisely what a keylogger.
A keylogger is a computer program usually belonging to the category of malware, which is installed resident in the memory of the affected electronic system, capturing all the keystrokes and, therefore, everything we type.
All this information is stored and sent in a predetermined way to whoever created and / or uses the keylogger, for subsequent analysis by a specific program that, in this way, will try to establish what usernames and passwords are, as well as possibly other data.
A keyloggerWell, not only does it help us to capture passwords, but we will really know everything that the person to whom we spy on you write, whether they are e-mails, comments on the web pages you visit, or messages from WhatsApp.
In addition to a software, the keylogger It can also be a device for hardware, which is installed connected to the keyboard, or to the port that it uses on the computer.
However, the keyloggers for software due to their ease of installation, since physical contact with the victim's machine is not required, and they can be installed remotely.
The keylogger consult directly to hardware or to operating system installed in the machine to know each key that has been pressed.
Remember that each press of the keyboard is treated by the computer as an "interrupt", that is, a mechanism that causes an immediate and practically unstoppable reaction in the operating system.
A keylogger It can both intercept the interrupt information and the use that the operating system makes of said signal.
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