Modern age - Computer Surveillance
As computers have become more important and widely used in our daily lives, means of computer surveillance have become increasingly diverse.
Keystroke loggers
Keystroke loggers are means (either in hardware or software) that can capture a user's keystrokes. Knowing a person's keystrokes can reveal important private information, such as their passwords, which can be used to do further surveillance.
One type of keylogger is a local machine software keylogger. Such a program targets a computer's operating system and may be based at the kernal level or is run as a program in the background. Some types of keyloggers work by observing the state of each key on a keyboard many times per second. These devices usually tend to increase CPU usage.
Another type of keylogger is embedded in hardware and is attached somewhere between a computer keyboard and the computer. Such a device does not affect the performance of the machine and cannot be detected by the software.
An example of a hardware keystroke logger. Such a device is impossible for software to detect and can very reliably monitor someone's keystrokes.
http://keykatcher.com/osc/images/128k.jpg
Spyware
The first time the term spyware was used was in 1995 on a Usenet post that described the Microsoft's business model. At first it was meant to refer to hardware devices used for surveillance. In June 2000, the first anti-spyware application called OptOut was released by Steve Gibson. In October of 2004, AOL and the National Cyber-Security Alliance performed a survey that found that 80% of Internet users had heir system affected by spyware and that 89% of those users were unaware of the existence of the spyware.
Packet Sniffing
Packet Sniffing refers to software that can record packets that are traveling through a network. The software must capture each packet and put them together (decode) to get a complete picture of the message being sent.
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