An in-depth analysis of the epitome of online stealth: Keyloggers; and their countermeasures

Abstract

Malware came into existence ever since the inception of the computers itself and its spread has been gaining momentum as a result of persistent success and evolution of the Internet. Cyber world has been noticing a shift in the goals of malware writers, which would only become more insidious with time. Currently the matter of great concern for Internet users is that of online stealth. In this paper we discuss in detail about the epitome of online stealth, the keyloggers; present an analysis of few well known anti-keyloggers; list a set of counter-measures for the users based on our analysis; and also present our approach for client side authentication to reduce the attack surface available to the hackers. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.