We are developing programs to monitor user activity of home (Personal Monitor) and office (Employee Monitor) computers, as well as to control usage of your children’s computer (Time Sheriff).
A regular update version 6.2.2.1107 is available for Refog Personal Monitor and Employee Monitor.
The main change is added support for Google Chrome. As well as minor error fixed and user interface tweaks.
If you have automatic product updates disabled you can download the update right from our web site.
We’re finishing up development of a new edition of Refog Employee Monitor designed specifically for terminal servers — Refog Terminal Monitor. Development had started in March 2010 and now we’re finally ready to unveil Terminal Monitor 6.2.0.1100.
Core features include:
We’ve included all the features we had aimed for back in March. The software has passed thorough testing and is already available for purchase.
In addition to full-featured monitoring programs we decided to offer you an interesting and useful product — hardware keyloggers. Its installation is faster and configuration is easier.
We will show you the possibilities of such devices on the example of two of them: Hardware Keylogger Basic Edition with 4 Mb of memory for connection to PS / 2 and USB. They look like this:
The essence of the devices is extremely simple: they are installed between the keyboard and the computer and retain in its memory all the keys pressed on the keyboard. These keyloggers have a built-in flash drive of 4 Mb (this is quite a lot for a purely text information — more than 2000 pages), but there are also models with multiple gigabytes of memory.
They can’t be detected by a computer or anti-virus software, do not require drivers and work on any operating system. But let’s take everything in turn…
We have made a regular update of Refog Personal Monitor and Employee Monitor programs to version 6.1.7.1044.
The main change compared with the previous version:
You can already download the new version of softwares from our website or simply wait until the program will remind about the update.
We have added some videos which present the main aspects of setting up the Refog Personal Monitor program: registration, enabling and disabling stealth mode, uninstallation of the program.
Registration of the program:
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Disable the stealth mode:
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Uninstalling the program from a computer:
In case the program settings are protected with a password it will be required to uninstall the program. |
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Google has added a virtual onscreen keyboard for typing in visitor’s mother tongue to the search and result pages of its search system. 35 languages are available with the exception of English and Chinese. Now there’s an icon next to the search box. When clicked it launches a virtual keyboard. With its help symbols are typed by mouse clicks on the desired letter on the screen.
About a year ago a program interface (API) was presented for free use of such a keyboard on third party web sites or in browser-based scripts.
Such a feature could be useful not only in case when you are forced to use a keyboard without necessary national layout (for example, while traveling), but also in case you fear a possible interception of data entered from the keyboard (such as when using public computers, Internet cafes, etc.).
Using the virtual keyboard will protect you not only from hardware keyloggers, but also from illegally installed primitive spy software.
Today come regular software updates of Refog Personal Monitor and Employee Monitor to version 6.1.6.1040.
You can download a new version of software from our web site or wait until the program automatically updates if you have this option enabled.
The main changes in the new version:
1. Optimization of software installation.
A lot of internal changes in the installer programs, made to accelerate and simplify their installation.
2. Reworked localization.
Fixed bugs and inaccuracies in translation of the programs into other languages.
3. Changed duration of the trial period.
Now the period of free trial use of the programs is 3 days for Personal Monitor and 30 days for Employee Monitor.
The first programs intercepting keystrokes (keyloggers) appeared in the 90s. They were very primitive and complied with a single function – recording the sequence of keystrokes in the log file. Later, they were designed to periodically send this file to e-mail and safely hide themselves in the system (it was not so difficult in Windows 9x). By 2000, there were already more than 300 different keylogging programs.
By 2002, these programs begin to specialize. For example, there appears a paid program to keep track of one’s partners – Loverspy. It was much discussed in the press. In addition, the main purpose of such programs are not keystrokes now but the network user’s activity, mainly – e-mail correspondence.
By 2005, the number of different keylogging programs has already surpassed 6000. They are divided into two groups by the way of usage: some have become hacker tools or a part of viruses, and other – legitimate tools which are not a subject to civil or criminal penalties for its user. In other words, there were found legitimate ways for usage of spyware programs:
There appeared programs that protect users from illegal keyloggers and anti-spyware modules in anti-virus programs.
Hardware solutions have appeared in addition to software ones. These are small devices built into a keyboard, system unit, or between them, which can capture and store all the information typed on the keyboard. Such devices are difficult to detect and there is no need to even turn on the computer in order to install them.
Later scientists’ researches have shown that even these devices are not necessary, as up to 96% of information typed from the keyboard can be restored with audio of sounds that keyboard is creating while typing.
With the growing popularity of social networks and programs for messaging in these networks, there appeared functions for tracking of such communication in today’s monitoring programs.
Nowadays, development trends of these programs are changing again. The Internet is becoming more mobile, and mobile devices – more functional. Modern phones are equipped with powerful processors, fast Internet connection and GPS-positioning detectors that makes them a target for tracking programs. For example, there already exist programs to protect your phone against theft, which periodically report to the owner its exact location.
Development of Refog software is a continuous process: any detected errors in older versions are eliminated; releases of new products and updates of the old ones are prepared.
In this blog we’ll inform you about all the new products and added features and explain their purpose. Earlier the information about new features in the program was presented as a line of a text, but now it will be a detailed description with screenshots and videos.
Meanwhile you can see the development history of Refog Personal Monitor program from 2007 to the present date.
At the moment we are working on a special version of Refog Employee Monitor, designed for usage on terminal servers. The working title of the program is Refog Terminal Monitor.
Terminal server — is a server that provides clients with computing resources to perform tasks. Technically, that is a very powerful computer connected on a network with terminal clients, which are usually represented by low-end workstations or specialized solutions for access to the terminal server.
Terminal servers from Microsoft and Citrix are used by many companies to organize users’ work.
Licenses for Refog Terminal Monitor will be issued based not on the number of computers, but on the number of the users of a terminal server (per user).
Depending on the settings made by the administrator, Terminal Monitor can notify users connected to the terminal server about monitoring.
The logs of users’ activity will be stored encrypted. An administrator will be able to customize storage location on the disk and the users eligible to view logs.
Refog Terminal Monitor will work only on server editions of MS Windows operating systems (both 32 and 64-bit) and will be designed to monitor the activity of all the users of a terminal server.
We are planning to release the program by the end of April or the beginning of May.