One of those "Oh no" moments

Someone was asking me about gadgets, and went off looking for something and turned up a page at Gadgets.co.uk innocently in a corner is something which you'd expect to find in Q's lab in a James Bond movie, but not in the "Amuse your friends by plugging into their PC" aisle. A key logger.

KeyShark is a small external device, looking like and [sic] adapter plugged into keyboard socket
"Installation takes just seconds, and the KeyShark starts to record automatically."
"With enough capacity to store half a million characters (key presses), it can quietly record the average computer user for many months and still have memory to spare."

I knew these things existed, but it came as a shock to find they're this freely available. At £49 each you can see a whole new generation of fraudsters buying a gross of them, and running round all the local cybercafes.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  To make matters worse, many of the devices can "phone home" by emailing the results to whoever you configure - hence you can leave such devices hidden away behind machines in less well run establishments and not even bother having to return

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  Not that I'm aware of. This is transparent to the OS, and I didn't think standard PC keyboards don't have the abilty to encypt. Possibly bluetooth ones can ...  

• Anonymous
  October 12, 2007
  Although I'm a right by saying Vista has a solution for this issue by having communications between input deives such as keyboards encrypted or something to that effect? I'm pretty sure I heard that at some event I was at several months ago.....or I could be dreaming it all up.