Keyloggers are a very real threat when surfing from public terminals (e.g. cybercafés). These utilities run in the background and record all keyboard strokes including your username and password.

The easiest and safest way to avoid keyloggers when surfing from a cybercafé is to use an on-screen keyboard. Windows provides an on-screen keyboard out of the box. However, it is useless since it registers each click as a physical keystroke. We had earlier told you how to thwart keyloggers using the Virtual Keyboard Interface for Firefox ^[1]. However, that solution worked only with Firefox and required installation.

Neo’s SafeKeys is a free portable (doesn’t require installation) on-screen keyboard utility which provides sophisticated protection against keyboard loggers. Some of the salient features of Neo’s SafeKeys are:

• Protects you from keyloggers since on-screen key presses aren’t translated to physical keystrokes.
• The utility changes dimensions as well as position on screen every time. This renders any mouse-click loggers useless.
• A newer breed of (rare) malware called screenloggers attempt to defeat on-screen keyboards by capturing screenshots on every mouse click. Neo’s SafeKeys 2008 now supports key press by simply hovering over the on-screen buttons to defeat these malwares.
• Protects you against clipboard loggers since data isn’t stored in the clipboard. You need to drag and drop data from Neo’s SafeKeys to the web form.

[ Download Neo's SafeKeys 2008 ^[2] ]