Dev builds a working keylogger in 15 minutes, then can't reliably detect it
MariyaSha888 · x · 2026-11-05
Developer Mariya Sha shares a security experiment: with AI assistance she built a fully functioning keylogger plus a remote API endpoint collecting every keystroke in just 15 minutes — then spent over 2 hours trying to detect her own creation without success.
Key takeaways:
- Keyloggers are hard to spot unless you already know what to look for; they blend in with legitimate processes
- Comparing network activity while typing vs. idle can catch loggers that exfiltrate keys in real time
- Loggers that upload once a day or fire on specific system events would evade this detection entirely
The experiment was intended as the basis for a defense tutorial, and she asks the community for better detection approaches.
More from coding & agent
- Mistral Studio ships agents, apps and workflows, on-prem arrives end of November — MistralAI · 2026-11-05
- Mistral Launches Workflows and Managed Agents for Automating Business Processes — MistralAI · 2026-11-05
- Mistral launches Le Chonk model and Studio managed agents, workflows and apps — MistralAI · 2026-11-05
- Hacker turns old Echo Dot into a Hermes agent speaker, open-sources the Home Assistant setup — Teknium · 2026-11-05
- LangChain explains its full ecosystem — LangChain, LangGraph and Deep Agents in 3 minutes — LangChain · 2026-11-05
- Agent evals: start from support-queue failures, but pair each case with a should-not twin — rahulladumor · 2026-11-05