Marshall Brain's Blog

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Something else to worry about #3

[See previous]

In San Jose, students were recently caught using a KeyKatcher to capture teacher passwords, break into the school's computer system and download tests:



The Key Katcher device contains a microcontroller and 64K of flash memory. You plug it into the keyboard cable of any desktop PC. It stores every keystroke typed on the keyboard -- more than 60,000 of them (a slightly larger version can store more than 130,000 keystrokes). Later you unplug the Key Katcher, take it home and look at the characters it captured. It only takes about 10 seconds to plug one in or unplug it, and it gets its power from the keyboard cable.

The Key Katcher is so small that it is almost undetectable, but the paranoid among us will probably start checking publicly available PCs before typing anything.