The number of keyloggers unleashed by hackers exploded this year, soaring by 65 percent in 2005 as e-criminals rush to steal identities and information, a security intelligence firm said Tuesday. "The overall number of keyloggers has just skyrocketed this year," said Ken Dunham, senior engineer with Reston, Va.-based VeriSign iDefense. "It's all part of the last year's, 18 months' change in motive toward crimeware." Keyloggers are small programs, silently installed by the attacker, typically after an earlier attack that compromised the computer through a vulnerability in the operating system or Internet browser, that record all or selected keystrokes, then sends that data to the hacker. To read the entire article visit, http://www.internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?sssdmh=dm4.158123&articleId=173603239

Hi Doug, Thanks for the info. Now what do you reccomend to prevent this? I use Ad-Aware Pro but does this really pick up the keyloggers? I suspect that there is a keylogger installed on my computer at work but ad-aware showed nothing. Any suggestions?

Hi Arthur, There are only about a dozen decent keyloggers out there. Ive never seen Ad Aware miss one. They are all basically the same so they are pretty easy to pick up. Does your Ad Aware have the Process Monitor ? If its missing one and I doubt it is, it would show up there as a running process. Hope this helps. Take care