Will using a password vault thwart a keylogger?
Hi, everyone. Leo.
Notenboom here for Askleo.com
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So let's jump right to the question, "Leo.
If one uses a password filler such as
RoboForm or LastPass and your computer gets infected with the malware keylogger,
can it pick up your passwords when you aren't actually typing them in?
If not, this makes a very good case for having an encrypted password filler
such as RoboForm or the others you've mentioned in past columns."
Unfortunately, the answer to this one is both yes and no.
Using a password fault can in fact bypass certain types of key loggers.
However,
not all key loggers work the same.
And as I've said so many times before,
key loggers are just malware, and malware can do anything.
Let's see what I mean by that.
You can't assume that a key logger works a particular way.
Like I said, yes, there are key loggers
that only log keystrokes, no keystrokes, nothing to log.
Great. In principle, it sounds awesome.
However, keyloggers can often work in many other ways.
The ways include things like
watching the clipboard to see what's traveling through the clipboard in case
your password vault happens to use the clipboard to transfer information
from the vault to the website you're logging into.
They could be monitoring the input fields on the web page.
So rather than watching keystrokes fly by, they're watching...
Oh, this field just got some data.
Let's snag that data.
No keystrokes were involved,
no keystrokes were monitored, but the keystroke logger the key logger
still managed to see what was entered because it was looking at entry fields.
There are hundreds of different ways that a keylogger can log keystrokes
without actually logging physical keystrokes.
That's really, really important to understand.
So what that means is that while you might successfully bypass keystroke loggers
that do only log physical keystrokes, you haven't bypassed the rest.
Ultimately, the most important thing to realize about a keylogger is that if
you've got a key logger on your machine, you have malware on your machine,
and malware can do anything and that anything can be monitoring any
of the data that flows through your system, regardless of the path it takes.
It could do anything like capturing screenshots as you go.
It could be recording video.
For all we know,
there are so many different ways that malware can capture this information
that it is not useful to look for ways
to bypass specific types of malware.
What you need to do is prevent malware in the first place,
and that, unfortunately, is really, really boring, right?
That's the stuff we've been saying over and over and over again.
Be skeptical.
Have good anti malware software.
Don't click on links that you don't know where they're taking to you don't open
attachments the number one way that machines get infected these days.
If you're not expecting an attachment from someone,
basically practice good Internet safety and avoid malware in the first place.
Keyloggers are just one form, and they themselves are so many different
kinds of malware that any type of avoidance mechanism won't avoid all
of them and in fact probably won't avoid most of them.
Now, I still want you to use a password vault.
Absolutely,
because they enable part of what I've just suggested you do: better security.
When you increase your overall security,
you increase your resilience to things like malware, things like keyloggers.
When it comes to password vaults, they enable you to use long,
complex passwords that you can't possibly remember.
They allow you to use those long, complex,
unmemorable passwords differently on every site you have.
They just enable a level of password
security that is so important these days that I can't suggest not using a password
vault but using a password vault to bypass keyloggers.
No, that's not a reason because a password
fault may bypass some but absolutely will not bypass them all. Hope that was helpful.
I hope that clarifies what's going
on. For updates for related links for comments and more, visit
askleo.com/6372 I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is Ask. Leo.com