'Kayoty' - the first ever home-made spyware monitor

A screenshot of 'Kayoty' in action

Keeping this in mind, Subedar Technologies, a local software company, developed a spyware traffic monitoring system known as 'Kayoty', which in Bangla means ('Kay' 'Oty') 'who's that?' 'Kayoty' became a pride for our country by securing it's position in the popular software site tucows's (www.tucows.com) anti-spyware rank listing.

Aftab Jahan Subedar, software engineer and owner of Subedar Technologies and the architect of 'Kayoty', claims this monitoring system to be a hardware level software interface.

"Tucows still remians one of the oldest and most-popular net clearance houses," said Subedar claiming that this is the first time ever that any Bangladeshi software is actually being approved by such a download-site like Tucows for sale and download.

"While running as a piece of software, 'Kayoty' actually taps into the computer's hardware level to generate the traffic monitor," cites Subedar.

Built using Visual C++, 'Kayoty' will display information about the internet or intranet connections of a computer, including IP address, host names, direction of the traffic,

amount of data transacted in bytes and the last connection timestamp.

This display which is more like a machinery stethoscope, hence exposes the leakage and will act as a warning to the targeted computer's owner or user.

Spywares, which are not to be compared with PC viruses act to infest a computer by leaking out its browsing information or hard disk data to a motherserver, or vice versa, and this server is where the spywares are controlled from.

Immediate symptoms of a spyware attack are usually overload of netwrok traffic that is not generated by the users themselves or losing control over browsers like Microsoft Internet Explorer. "Kayoty will even notice you if network traffic is initiated while you're not using the computer," says Subedar, stating that this is one of the possible actions by spywares.

Spy software can record your keystrokes as you type them, passwords, credit card numbers, sensitive information, where you surf, chat logs and even take random screenshots of your activities.

A good number of spyware vendors use 'stealth routines' and 'polymorphic' (meaning to change) techniques to avoid detection and removal by popular anti-spy software. In some cases, spyware vendors have gone as far as to counter-attack anti-spy packages by attempting to make them inactive.

Such spy programmes are commonly installed unknowingly by the user when they click on 'kool' links such as automated weather updates, calender managers, screen savers, atomic clock synchronisers, etc.

"These kinds of links are everywhere in the net and when one enjoys broadband connection, they tend to click on absolutely any link to exhibit the 'claimed power of faster download', leading to a spy-infected PC," mentioned Subeda