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Occasionally you'll want to access the accounts of someone who's computer you have access to. You may have a reason for needing to see inside the Facebook account of someone you live with or the Hotmail account of a friend or spouse. Of course, these accounts are immune to the usual hacking methods, the easiest way to gain access is to utilise a keylogger.

If you're not familiar with keyloggers (also referred to as computer monitoring software) they're programs that run silently on the target computer logging every activity that is undertaken on that machine. You can then go back over the logs at a later date. Keyloggers are perfect for retrieving passwords to sites like Facebook and Hotmail. Once installed you let them run for a number of days or until you know the site has been accessed, then you re-open the keylogger to see what has been typed into that particular website.

Installing a keylogger on a computer is also a perfect way to monitor someones Facebook activities. The software will take screenshots at set intervals (you could set it to every few seconds or every few minutes) and will monitor every keystroke entered, meaning you could monitor chat conversations and messages as well as emails in Hotmail and other webmail clients like Gmail.

Of course all of this is done in complete stealth and setting up a keylogger is very quick and simple. You simply download the installer (or have it prepared on a flash drive) install the program in a couple of minutes and set up your secret key combination and password, which is used to access the logs, everyone else won't have a clue they're being monitored. If you only have access to the targets computer once and can't get back to check the logs you can set them to be sent remotely via email.

Keyloggers are great for the beginner hacker and some of them even have a remote install function or a compiler that creates a disguised installer package that can be sent to the target as an email. They also monitor things like documents deleted, saved, printed etc and all applications used and websites visited. If you're interested in downloading a free trial of a keylogger check out Gecko Monitor by heading to http://www.GeckoMonitor.com