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2.4 The “legal” Keyloggers

Recently, the co-called “surveillance” commercial tools flooded the software

market. Suddenly, there is an “urgent” need for parents, bosses and others to

know what exactly kids and workers do on their computers. This fact inspired the

creation of many different kinds of legal spying software that may include

keylogger, screen capture and other functionality. Let’s see how an antivirus

vendors reacted to such tools. I downloaded one of “legal” keyloggers available,

called “Beyond keylogger” [8], installed it and checked with some antivirus

programs. Below is the result of the scan [6]:

This is a report processed by VirusTotal on 05/23/2005 at 20:47:17 (CET) after scanning the file

"CSRSS.EXE" file.

not-a-virus:RiskWare.Monitor.BeyondKeyLogger.156

These results clearly show that there is a problem in dealing with “legal”

keyloggers. The question now: Why the malicious virus writer will ever want to

create and debug his own keylogger (that after a short period of time will be

“banned” by antivirus programs) and not to use a legal one? Possibly, at the near

future, we will see malware that installs such a “legal” keylogger preconfigured to

send the results of spying to the “bad” person.