Passwords

We’ll look at some special considerations when it comes to protecting our passwords and making sure no malicious program snatches them from us. We won’t talk about how complex or predictable they are, but about the care we need to take so that third parties can’t capture them.

First of all, most people nowadays log in to their email, Facebook, Messenger, Skype and so on without a second thought, from any computer, without stopping to consider whether that computer is secure. Internet cafés are one example. You might wonder what the risk could be if the antivirus is running perfectly on that machine. In reality, whether or not the owner knows it, antivirus software can be configured not to detect certain malicious programs and, in a more complex scenario, those programs can also bypass and evade it.

The most basic and elementary kind of program we should worry about is the so-called “keylogger”. Keyloggers are the most elementary category of malware, which is why you’ll find plenty of information about them online. Basically, they capture every key the user presses. That includes personal conversations and, obviously, passwords and usernames.

Personally, I’ve found this kind of malware on other people’s computers and in internet cafés, living peacefully alongside the antivirus. The safest thing would be never to log in to our personal accounts from any computer other than our own, but I doubt most people are willing to do that.

So we come to the question many of you must be asking right now: how can we keep using other people’s computers while being better protected from these threats? Below are some recommendations for a higher level of security. We can never achieve 100%, since every method or system can be breached, but we can greatly reduce the risk of having our passwords stolen.

Instead of typing the password on the keyboard, we can copy and paste it from a text file that we could, for example, carry on a USB stick. This simple trick stops a keylogger from capturing our password. However, the data we copied stays in the clipboard and can therefore be accessed later by a person or a program. So we should clear the clipboard as follows:

Windows 7 / Vista

On the desktop we can create a shortcut and, when asked for the location of the item, enter cmd /c «echo off | clip» , then choose any label for the shortcut. When we double-click it, the Windows clipboard (not Office’s) will be cleared.

Windows XP

In this case you can download the following tool directly from Microsoft. When you run it, the Windows clipboard is cleared completely.

Clipboard cleaner