Spector Pro is Big Brother on your Mac, watching every move your children (or employees, spouse, or roommates) make and generating searchable logs for easy snooping. When the app runs in Stealth mode, it’s truly stealth, not appearing in the Dock, Applications folder, Force Quit menu, System Profiler, or anywhere else. Just press your personal key-combo, then type your chosen password, and you can keep tabs on nearly anything the users of the monitored Mac do.
You need an administrator password to install Spector Pro Mac 2009, and then you choose your own password for accessing the app once it’s running, plus a hotkey combination to launch the password dialog. The main app window lets you tweak dozens of settings under its Screen Snapshots, Chat/IM Activity, Web Sites Visited, Email Activity, Keystrokes Types, and User Activity tabs.
It sees you when you email. It know what you IM.
Here’s what you’ll find in each one: Screen Snapshots takes periodic snaps of the screen (with support for multiple monitors), which you can play back like a time-lapse video. Chat/IM Activity captures all chat conversations—unless the chat client uses a secure SSL connection, although Spector Pro can help you turn SSL off. Web Site Activity is just what it sounds like, and in our tests it even logged sites we visited while using Safari’s Private Browsing Mode. (Note that Spector Pro isn’t an Internet filter and won’t help you block specific sites; stick with System Preferences > Parental Controls for that.) The app couldn’t tell what RSS articles we read in Google Reader, but the screenshots at least show a list of our feeds.
Email Activity works with standalone email apps plus webmail accounts, and can also keep a record of attachments sent and received. Keystrokes Typed is a catchall keylogger—it didn’t always recognize which apps we were typing in (Word and Excel showed up as “Unknown,” although our keystrokes were logged correctly), but it did pick up passwords we typed into our VPN client and various Web forms. User Activity shows you when users logged on and off.
In our tests, Spector Pro didn’t slow down the Mac’s performance at all. The reports are easy to read and search. To check the logs from another Mac on the network, you can share the folder that holds them, then install another copy of Spector Pro on the second Mac, but set the app up as a Viewer, which lets it open and read the log files stored on the monitored Mac. If you already use MobileMe, you can also check the logs using Back To My Mac to remotely access the monitored computer.
Spector Pro’s software license agreement requires you to inform anyone using the Mac that their activities are being monitored—this is powerful software, so don’t use it for evil! But to keep an eye on who’s talking to your kids online or which websites your employees are visiting, Spector Pro just works.
Simple installation. Searchable logs. Stealth mode prevents tampering. Universal binary.
Keylogger didn't recognize all applications.
