How to Detect Keystroke Logger

Keystroke loggers are extremely prevalent these days, which means that it's more important than ever to check whether or not your key strokes are being recorded. Keyloggers are programs that record your keystrokes for a third party and thus provide access to passwords and other sensitive information. This makes it one of the most common methods that hackers use to access private accounts.

Difficulty:

Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need

• Version of Windows

1. Press Ctrl+Alt+Delete on your keyboard. This will bring up your computer's Task Manager window where you can view all the programs that are running on your computer.

2. Examine all the programs that are currently running in the window that pops up.

3. Research any suspicious sounding programs that appear in the window. Names like "Acespy" or abbreviations such as "WebPI" should be a dead giveaway. For a more complete list of keylogger file names, refer to the link in the Resources section.

4. Highlight any such programs and click the "End Task" button at the bottom of the task manager window.

5. Download and run antivirus spyware. Most antivirus programs detect keyloggers, but Spybot S&D is especially useful for this particular type of spyware problem (a link can be found in Resources below).

6. Restart your computer.

7. Reopen the Task Manager and make sure that the malicious program is no longer there.

Tips & Warnings

• If none of these techniques detect anything and yet you still believe that you have a keylogger on your computer, consider downloading some software designed specifically to detect keyloggers. Once such program can be found at dewasoft.com (see Resources).

Resources

• Spybot S&D source
• Dewasoft.com: Keylogger specific virus scan software
• Keylogger file names