How to prevent your sensitive information from being revealed to a keylogger infected computer

What is keylogger?

Keystroke logging, often referred to as keylogging or keyboard capturing, is the action of recording (logging) the keys struck on a keyboard, typically covertly, so that the person using the keyboard is unaware that their actions are being monitored. This attack can be achieved by using a software typically called keylogger or keystroker.


Scenario:

Suppose you want to use an Internet café or a public computer to login to your personal account on a bank web site, but you suspect that the computer is infected with software keylogger.

Assuming that, you have access both a web browser window and a text editing window open at the same time. As a security expert you want to protect your sensitive data in particular user credentials from the affected malware.


Summary of the Solution:

Type random characters on the text editor in between of typing your sensitive infomation (e.g. password) on the browser.

Solution:

Keyloggers work based on the monitoring active window interactions with keyboard and don’t recognize the mouse events. If we have both web browser and text editing window open, the best way to get around the keylogger is type quickly between the two windows and when typing username and password on a browser, randomly press characters and type others on the text box and move between text box and browser continuously.

This is confusing the keylogger by receiving a long string or presses characters which is unusable for the attacker.

I would also personally advise even if we follow the above principle, we change the passwords immediately after using in a public suspected area and have multi-factor authentication enabled as well.

Note: If the text editor is not available on the computer, we can use a second application or even a different tab of the browser and use them to type random characters in between.