Most people reading this will be familiar with what a person who is labeled a hacker, does. If you aren’t familiar then you probably will be, however for the majority that are familiar, you may not be very familiar with how a hacker does what they do. Keylogging is one of the ways that hackers can gather, or steal your information, and information about you. As the name implies keylogging is simply making a log of every key which is pressed on the keyboard that you use to input data into your computer, however nowadays this also stands for smart phones as they too require a keyboard. So whether it is your phone or computer the person or organization which may have installed the keylogger onto your device, is still receiving and monitoring information about you, which in a way you are giving out yourself.
How keylogging really works is simple. The keylogger itself is another program, just like spyware or any other malware, once on the target device it will set itself as the standard keyboard for phone to use, even with other keyboards installed on your phone, though what makes this one different is that it will be monitoring and recording all the keystrokes that occur on the board and be forwarding this information on. If you are chatting with a friend through your phone, that chat can be monitored by the keylogger. If you have accessed any site which required you to punch in some credentials, logging in to an account for example, what you typed in exactly can be intercepted and uncovered by a third party. Moreover, even things that you have searched up can be seen, since everything that is inputted through the board is monitored. A very simple, but dangerously effective way to gather information from and about, a bit like recording everything one says with out them knowing.
Keyloggers could get on to your phone in a variety a ways, the most prominent and obvious would be in the forma of a regular on screen keyboard for the kind of smart phone you have, however covertly also storing a keylogging feature which the user is deliberately kept unaware of. The other could be for a keylogging software to be disguised completely in the form of another application, a game or any app for that matter.
You can protect yourself from this problem in a variety of ways for example for Samsung smart phone users its quite easy, you can simply go to ‘locale and text’ and have a look for yourself if there are more than two keyboards installed, or present on the phone. One may be the regular keyboard which was factory installed though if you see something else which sounds a bit fancy that would be good to look in to. Though don’t forget that it may be a sober name to make it seem normal something like ’standard keyboard’.
Also if you have look in to the messaging options on your phone you should see the input methods. In this again if you see some app other than the regular keyboard which is part of the operating system that is installed on your phone, you may want to delete that, unless you installed it yourself and are perfectly sure that it is safe to use.
‘Managing applications’ is another place you can scan to check for any applications that are downloaded and running which you didn’t put on to the phone yourself, or is not suppose to be there.
Author Bio: Stella Rebecca has been in the business of providing quality information on tracking app for Iphone. Her main expertise lies within the spectrum of Moniotring software for Android and Spy app for cell phone which are making waves in the technology world today..
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