Keyloggers is a very powerful invisible software where it is able to monitor every activity on the computer and automatically sending the logs to the installer without the user realizing it. Have you ever encountered a situation where your friend or a family member wants to borrow your personal laptop just because they are bored? If you’ve protected your personal and sensitive files with an encryption software such as TrueCrypt, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re safe because you may never know if they’ve decided to secretly install a keylogger on your computer to monitor what you do. There are some solutions to keep your PC safe while allowing other people to use your computer such as enabling the Guest account or installing a software such as Returnil that is able to rollback the computer to the way it was with a reboot. However if you didn’t manage to take the precautionary measures, you can still find out a list of programs last run or opened on your computer with UserAssistView.
Windows stores information about the exe files and links that you open frequently in the UserAssist key in the Registry. The information are encrypted but the small UserAssistView tool created by Nir Sofer is able to decrypt and display the list of all UserAssist entries. All you need to do is run the UserAssistView on the computer that you want to view the last run programs and click on the Modified Time column to sort the results according to the latest date.
If you see a program name that is similar to advanced_keylogger.exe as shown on the screenshot above, then the person who last used your computer definitely cannot be trusted. However it would be a different story if the person is your father, mother or employer :P For unknown file names, you can always do a search in Google to find out more about the program. It is also possible to delete the UserAssist entries on the computer with the UserAssistView tool.
UserAssistView is free, portable and compatible with Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows 7.
UserAssistView Finds Out Last Run Program without Using a Keylogger is a post from: Raymond.CC Blog