The Kaspersky Virtual Keyboard utility, comes with a subscripton to Kaspersky Internet Security. The Virtual Keyboard plug-in extension icon will appear on the browser toolbar. See the 3 examples below (red arrow) in Safari, Chrome and Firefox. For those who use Password Keeper, the use of the brower plugin icon is similar.

When you’ve opened your browser and begin to enter a password in a password field, the virtual keyboard opens.(see below) If you perfer that it not auto-launch, it can be disabled in Preferences. Below is what the keyboard looks like. It resembles the Mac Aluminun Bluetooth keyboard.

By the way Kaspersky, www.Kaspersky.com a Russian software company, has enjoyed a good reputation for finding root kits that other security software have failed to find. It’s rootkit utility is named TDSS Killer. Hope you don’t get infected with a root kit. Rootkits are designed to be very stealthy and to hide the existence of certain processes from normal detection. Neither coincidental or directly related, many of the code writers of very problematic and malicious software is authored in Russia.

Aside from the now common software keyloggers, earlier loggers were in the hardware form. The most common as a keyboard logger that looked like a PS2 mouse adapter, and in fact was interfaced to the system unitl (tower) via the mouse, and did not raise susspecion. Others crude types of hardware keyloggers were bulky and installed in a manner where others did not have the opportunity to view them.

Sony endured a black eye when their software purposely contained a root kit. Sony’s purpose was to prevent copying of its software and interfered with the CD/DVD software an the computer and created vulnerabilities which malware could exploit. They also hid the rootkit. Then under pressure of critisim, released an “un-hide”, though the “un-hide” installed additonal software that couldn’t be easily uninstalled, and further increased the operating system to security vulnerabilites.  It was also harvesting the users email address and “calling-home” with information about what music the user was listening to. This borders on “criminal” I think.