Educational Keylogger

⚠️ IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

This project is strictly for educational purposes to understand how keylogging works at a technical level.

WARNING: Using keyloggers to monitor others without explicit consent is:

• Illegal in most jurisdictions
• Unethical and a violation of privacy
• Potentially subject to criminal prosecution

Only use this code on your own computer for learning purposes.

About

This is a simple keylogger implementation in Python that demonstrates:

• Keyboard event monitoring using the pynput library
• Event-driven programming
• File logging
• Real-time key capture

Features

• Captures all keyboard input
• Logs keystrokes to a timestamped file
• Displays real-time key presses in the console
• Can be stopped by pressing ESC
• Creates organized log files in a logs/ directory

Requirements

• Python 3.6 or higher
• pynput library

Installation

1. Install the required dependencies:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Run the keylogger:

python keylogger.py

To stop the keylogger, press the Ctrl+C inside the console where this script is running.

How It Works

1. Listener Setup: Uses pynput.keyboard.Listener to monitor keyboard events
2. Event Callbacks:
   • on_press(): Triggered when a key is pressed
   • on_release(): Triggered when a key is released
3. Logging: All keystrokes are logged to a timestamped file with datetime stamps
4. Graceful Exit: Press Ctrl+C to terminate the listener

Educational Value

This project helps understand:

• Operating system event handling
• Python's event-driven programming
• File I/O operations
• Security concepts and attack vectors
• The importance of input security