Full Disclosure: Re: Most common keystroke loggers?

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Gustavo wrote:

> If you want to provide reliable authentication, given that the user
> has a keystroke logger installed, you may simply use a visual keyboard
> written in Java.
Dude -- you really are out of your depth here...

Barclays (and other UK banks?) were doing this in the late 90s.  Within 
months keyloggers that took screenshots of a small area around the 
mouse pointer hot-spot were being found.

Some South American banks currently under massive identity 
theft/keylogging "attack" (like Banco Brasil) apparently don't talk to 
others in the banking industry, as some have recently started using 
such "on-screen keyboards" to "defeat" the keylogging attackers that 
hound their customers.  Within a very short time period we saw some of 
those keyloggers adapt by adding screenshot-grabbing of a small area 
around the mouse point hot-spot.  Seems they talked with uninformed 
"security consultants" rather than folk who know how systems work, what 
malware is, what it can do that it may not be doing today and, in this 
case, what has already been tried and trivially beaten...

If you don't understand that all the I/O on the "compromised" machine 
(for the types of machine we are talking about) can be intercepted, you 
shouldn't be trying to answer the OP's question (and if the OP 
understood that, he would not have asked as he would have realized he 
was aiming at doing the impossible).


Regards,

Nick FitzGerald

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