Keylogger in Hewlett-Packard Audio Driver
<i>Actually, the purpose of the software is to recognize whether a special key has been pressed or released.</i><p>I&#x27;m doubtful of the utility of software like this. Every driver and application seems to want to keep a persistent background process running, and because of the natural inefficiency of software (this executable is ~2MB --- why it needs to be this big, I&#x27;m not certain; from a brief inspection, all it seems to be doing is controlling microphone mute&#x2F;unmute), results in a huge waste of resources and new computers which appear no more responsive and than older ones.<p>However, to put the severity of this problem in perspective, from the description this is not like a typical keylogger that sends keystrokes out to some remote server; it only logs locally.<p><i>If you regularly make incremental backups of your hard-drive - whether in the cloud or on an external hard-drive – a history of all keystrokes of the last few years could probably be found in your backups.</i><p>There&#x27;s going to be plenty of <i>other</i> sensitive information in your backups, which if you don&#x27;t want others to read you would use encryption anyway, in which case the point is rather moot.<p><i>Any process that is running in the current user-session and therefore able to monitor debug messages, can capture keystrokes made by the user.</i><p>...or it could just monitor the keystrokes itself with SetWindowsHookEx() like this process.<p>Thus, I think the correct reaction to this is more towards the &quot;oops... that wasn&#x27;t a good idea&quot; than &quot;everybody panic!&quot;