Keystroke logging is the process of recording every keystroke made on a keyboard. You've probably heard about "keyloggers" while reading into malware – the tools used to carry out keystroke ...

The use of keyloggers by police, however, seems to be uncommon: A search on Monday through legal databases for terms such as "keylogger" turned up only the Scarfo and Forrester-Alba cases.

Keyloggers, which silently record keystrokes in an attempt to steal information, can range from being very easy to very difficult to detect, depending upon how and what was installed.

Basically, methods that hackers use to spread other malicious programs can also be used to spread keyloggers. How to know if a keylogger is installed in a computer.

To evade detection, the keylogger employs encoded command execution, transmitting commands using Base64 encoding. This technique obscures the commands from traditional security measures.

Lisa Napoli recently wrote an interesting summary in The New York Times of a computer crime involving public workstations that were compromised using keystroke loggers.