attn computer experts, finding the hacker...

iluvcats

My friend knew that her husband read their daughter's email via a sneaky keylogger, when the daughter was growing up, and she was ok with that. Now that the daughter is off to college, my friend asked me how to see if the keylogger is still there. She's got a pc, windows xp....what more do you need to know? I saw a movie where a lady was married to a maniac (she did not know it) and when she called the geek squad for the internet not working, he told her immediately that there was a keylogger installed. Is it that easy?

zacman13245

key loggers are tough, there's 5 or 6 different types, all of them acting differently. Without access to the computer that is possibly infected, its hard/nearly impossible to determine if a key logger is still there.

Most key loggers act as relays, they take in information, run in the background invisibly, and report back their findings on a scheduled basis, generally to an email address. Generally they save their reports to a hidden text file.

Do you have any access to the infected computer? If not, the only way to know if there is still a key logger is check the e-mail address that the logs would be sent to.

iluvcats

zacman13245 wrote:

key loggers are tough, there's 5 or 6 different types, all of them acting differently. Without access to the computer that is possibly infected, its hard/nearly impossible to determine if a key logger is still there.

Most key loggers act as relays, they take in information, run in the background invisibly, and report back their findings on a scheduled basis, generally to an email address. Generally they save their reports to a hidden text file.

Do you have any access to the infected computer? If not, the only way to know if there is still a key logger is check the e-mail address that the logs would be sent to.

I currently don't have access. I could go over her house. Online, I read that you can look at the files in your task manager. It takes a long time, but you can do a search on each of the executables to make sure they are legit. If not, you can end the process.

zacman13245

yep, you can do that, its a bit more time intensive, but if there's multiple processes of the same thing, generally thats a sign of malware and junk.

iluvcats

zacman13245 wrote:

yep, you can do that, its a bit more time intensive, but if there's multiple processes of the same thing, generally thats a sign of malware and junk.

sometimes I think that techies writing on forums offering their advice ("oh but it's quicker if you check it out by downloading this free stuff") are hackers

zacman13245

iluvcats wrote:

sometimes I think that techies writing on forums offering their advice ("oh but it's quicker if you check it out by downloading this free stuff") are hackers

often times thats the case, I'm generally very weary about downloading and installing things until I've done some research on the program.