Keylogger Keyboard Hardware

Here we show you a keyboard keylogger in use, and describe how it functions.


…and tear it down to see the innards.

Hi there, today we’re going to be talking about inline hardware keyloggers.

Software keyloggers are relatively easy to detect, and indeed usb based ones such as Teensy can be detected to a point with usb port control products.

What we’re looking at are inline keyloggers, and this is a keyboard we bought from eBay. It matches one that a client asked us to go and insert a keylogger into. I’m going to show you how straightforward it is to capture information, and how difficult that is to detect.

Here’s an example using our keylogged keyboard. Very straightforward to use, just typing away doing my normal stuff, could be logging in to an RDP box, lets see if we can capture some passwords.
This one of our junk accounts, and Yes, we will be changing the password later!

So we’ve logged in and captured something straightforward, all I have to do is go to a particular keystroke which you can customise, and give it a moment and this should now start to fire up the keylogger software so I can access it. We’re going to wait for that to fire up in a browser, so we’ll go back to my file browser and wait for it to pop up.

There you go, it’s starting to arrive. We now have the key logger connected, so we can go and look at it and I can now start to dump the data. I’ve got loads of stuff in there from the recent login activity.

Thought it might be fun to show you how this works. All I have to do is get my trusty screwdriver which of course is the most important device for a hardware engineer. Flip it over, dismantle it, get rid of the membrane, and here is our keylogger. Its “inline” so it’s very difficult to detect, but a very straightforward bit of kit. You see there’s a simple SD card on there, a micro SD card that record up to two gigabytes of keystrokes. That’s been a really useful way for us when we’re out doing penetration testing of gathering customer passwords.