Anti-Keylogger Trick

Most Filipinos access the Internet through Internet cafes of wildly varying quality — from posh luxury gaming centers to dingy little holes-in-the-wall (mostly the latter). The wide low end of that spectrum is a fertile password-hunting ground for keyloggers. Right now, Filipino script kiddies steal passwords to play infantile pranks on newbies’ social network and game accounts. As a fourth of the population moves online next year with social media advertising and RMT on the rise, things could get serious. That’s why hotseating Filipino netizens should use this anti-keylogger trick.

For example the segment

www.hotmail.comsarahj7@hotmail.comsnoopy2

tells the logger that sarahj7@hotmail.com has password “snoopy2� at hotmail. By parsing the string for common domains such as hotmail, paypal, amazon, fidelity, the task is made even easier.

Between successive keys of the password we will enter random keys. In the spirit of chaffing and winnowing, the string that the keylogger receives will contain the password, but embedded in so much random junk that discovering it is infeasible. Observe that we are not exploiting a particular feature of any particular browser: this trick works with all versions of Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Mozilla Firefox. We are exploiting the difficulty from the OS layer of determining how the GUI of an an application handles events. Here, then is the method:

Navigate to the login page desired;
Type in the userid;

for (each pwd character){
Give focus to anywhere but the pwd field;
Type some random characters;
Give focus to the pwd field;
Type the next character of the pwd}
Submit;

It involves typing random characters between successive characters of the password, and changing focus to and from the password field using the mouse. Instead of the password snoopy2 the keylogger now gets:

hotmail.comspqmlainsdgsosdgfsodgfdpuouuyhdg2

If you’re ever forced to enter a password at an unsecured public terminal (as millions of Filipinos are every day), limber up that mouse wrist and get ready to type lots of gibberish.

(Via Dan Cameron.)

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