Spyware for the home computer

By PETER GRIFFIN

It's the digital equivalent of bugging someone's phone and now you can do it to anyone - your children, your colleagues, the love of your life if you're suspicious enough.

It's the KeyGhost SX, a tiny device that sits between your keyboard and computer and remembers every keystroke you make - up to two million of them - no matter what computer program or internet window you are typing in.

KeyGhost's Christchurch-based creators claim the device is used by customers ranging from intelligence agencies to parents worried about their kids getting into "stranger danger" - meeting dodgy types in internet chatrooms and then taking the relationship offline.

All of that from a 5cm-long cylindrical chunk of plastic that plugs into the dusty nether regions of your PC beside the mouse plug and just above the printer connector.

But KeyGhost's trump card is simplicity. It's the ultimate in plug and play, or plug and snoop. Simply plug in the device, which carries a modest 512 kilobytes of non-volatile flash memory and it will record every press of every key, backing up to memory every four seconds.

There's no set-up process, no CD-ROM to be loaded.

It works across all operating systems from Windows to Linux to OS/2 and Dos, is 128-bit encrypted, does not need batteries and can be accessed on a different computer.

Any word processing software - Word Perfect, MS Word, Notepad WordPad - will display the contents of the device. Typing a default password "vghostlog" brings up a "ghost" menu which controls access to the KeyGhost's brain.

You can splurge back all of what has been typed or select a portion of the memory, though searching by date is a feature that's missing.

Compression will strip out the rubbishy keystrokes.

Firewall and virus scanning software obviously won't pick the KeyGhost up - they're sniffing around your internet connection and stored files. Spyware detecting software generally searches the hard drive for files associated with key-logging programs. That's the beauty of a hardware-based keylogger, it's much harder to detect.

At $249 the KeyGhost is a little pricey. After all, it's a standard connector with a chip of inbuilt memory. A host of USB flash memory storage pens are on the market for much less and many boast the same type of materials and up to 256 megabytes of memory. After a week of using the KeyGhost, I had used a third of its memory.

The KeyGhost has huge potential as a safety tool if used appropriately.

Still, there is infinite possibility for misuse. Imagine someone sneaking into your home office to slip a KeyGhost into the system. You would never know it was there. With back door trojan software they could even access your computer remotely, opening wordPad to run themselves off a copy of your email correspondence, online banking passwords, everything.

Either way, it's a powerful little tool.

KeyGhost SX

* Price: $249.

* Pros: Simple to install and use.

* Cons: Pricey, no retrieving by date, low on memory.

* Rating: 8/10.