Feb 10, 2007 7:17 am US/Eastern
CBS 2 Special Report: Hackers For Hire
Online Mercenaries Closing In On Your Elusive Password
by Brendan Keefe
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
Is your spouse cheating online?
If they are, here's how they are probably doing it -- using web-based e-mail accounts that allow them to keep those secret messages off the home PC. And beyond your reach.
The "Cheshire Catalyst" is a legendary "White Hat Hacker" -- but his black hat counterparts are offering to hack into your spouse's computer and find that elusive password, using something called a "keystroke logger."
"There are outfits out there who are making themselves available to put in these password crackers so you can find out what your spouse is doing in their e-mail that they're not telling you about," Cheshire Catalyst told CBS 2.
A keystroke logger is nothing more than a computer program that runs silently, invisibly in the background, lines of code that tell your computer to log every single key that is pressed. Nothing is sacred -- not even passwords. It's better than having a secret spy looking over your target's shoulder.
"If the person is then going to go out to Yahoo Mail, or Hotmail, or Gmail, MSN whatever, it's going to capture that username and password," Cheshire Catalyst said.
Passwords are not supposed to be protected behind those little asterisks, not with a keystroke logger CBS 2 downloaded for free.
It didn't take long to find the hidden password and the keylog file with the secret password.
"Every key we pressed, that information was transmitted," hacker victim David Levi said.
Levi is a victim, but his wasn't a case of infidelity. It was betrayal.
Someone close to him, with access to the family computer, installed the keystroke logger and got into all his private information.
"Our email accounts, bank accounts ...," Levi said. "It got to the point where we thought, um, you know, they could hear what we were saying -- that they could see us."
When asked if what was on the computer was completely invisible, Levi said, "Yes, completely invisible. If this person never revealed any information that we knew was impossible for them to get to, we would have never known."
So the spies aren't necessarily "out there" on the Internet. They could be inside your home, waiting for your fingers to tell them the secrets your lips would never reveal.
(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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