KeyScrambler Personal

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 02, 2011

Keyloggers are sneaky little programs that can record everything you type, including usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive information. Although antivirus software is often able to detect and eliminate such programs once you're infected, they're not foolproof. KeyScrambler Personal promises to encrypt your keystrokes at the level of your keyboard driver and decrypt them when they reach your browser so they're visible to you. Sounds good in theory, but does it work? We can't guarantee that it's perfect, but we can say that it worked just fine when we tried it.

Obviously, if we wanted to see if KeyScrambler Personal could guard against keyloggers, we'd have to install a keylogger on our machine. We did, made sure it was logging our keystrokes, and then installed KeyScrambler Personal. The program appeared as an icon in our system tray; right-clicking on it brought up an options menu, which let us set a hot key for enabling and disabling the program and specify how we wanted the program to display when in use. We set about typing in Firefox, one of KeyScrambler Personal's supported browsers, and a small box appeared that displayed the scrambled version of the text we typed. When we opened our keylogger to see what it had captured, there was all our scrambled text in place of what we'd actually typed. It's important to remember that KeyScrambler Personal doesn't encrypt everything you do; we were still able to view the Web sites we'd visited and search engine results. But text that we'd actually typed, such as in e-mails and in-browser chats, was indeed encrypted. An online Help file gives a thorough overview of the program's use. Overall, KeyScrambler Personal was easy to use and it seemed to be effective. It's worth checking out if you want to keep what you type safe from prying eyes.

KeyScrambler Personal installs and uninstalls without issues.