Trojan Virus - "layman's explanation"
What is a trojan virus?
Well the traditional term
goes back to the days of ancient Greece in the classic fable of Helen
of Troy. The Greeks had been trying to get in to Troy for rather a long
while without any appreciable success, the place was an impenetrable fortress
after all. So they decided to get sneaky. The Greeks built a large wooden
horse and offered it up to the people of troy (Trojans) as a gift. At
the same time they appeared to abandon there fight with the people of
Troy and pulled their troops back from the fortress.
The Trojans brought the horse in to the city and promptly started to celebrate
their victory. By nightfall the whole city was in a drunken uproar. They
celebrated far into the night. In the small hours of the morning, while
everyone was drunk or asleep, the Greeks unsealed the belly of the horse,
and climbed down from it. Silently, they killed the Trojan sentries at
all the city gates. The gates were then opened to the bulk of the Greek
army, who had returned under the cover of darkness and unnoticed by the
celebrating and drunken Trojans.
The Greeks had finally managed to get their army inside the city using
deception, after ten years of trying to gain entry by force of arms. They
then proceeded to slaughter the men and boys, keeping the women to be
sold as slaves. By daybreak Troy belonged to the Greek army with it's
populace either dead or in chains.
Here endeth the brief history lesson. ;)
What is a trojan horse virus?
[Other terms used for Trojans include back door virus, trojan worm, and computer worm]
In today's electronic world,
a Trojan Horse hasn't changed much. It generally appears as an email attachment
that is sent to you in the disguise of something useful or funny. It might
look like a joke, a screensaver, a picture, even a document from a friend,
much the same as a virus. Every time you execute a program that appears
as an attachment, you are opening yourself to the possibility of exposing
yourself to a Trojan horse exactly like the city of Troy. A Trojan horse
is actually a program that will run and install itself when you open the
attachment.
Once this Trojan horse has been introduced to your computer, the effects
could be endless. Since each creator may have a different objective, you
can never know what to expect. The Trojan could be a program designed
to vandalize your software and data or it could be a program that grants
the outside world access to your computer, all of its data and use of
your Internet connection. A Trojan can harvest account numbers and passwords
from the data on your computer. A Trojan can let the creator assume the
identity of your computer.
Picture this:
You get a knock on the door from the FBI and they accuse you of computer
hacking and seize your computer. In reality, someone used a Trojan horse
to launch viruses and hack other computers by actually using your computer
and your connection. Sound like fantasy? Ask a gentleman from Oregon that
it happened to last year, I doubt he was happy having his entire computer
seized and studied by the FBI.
Avoidance.
So how do you avoid getting a Trojan Horse? Good anti trojan virus protection
software. There are many shareware programs and commercial programs that
protect from Trojans.
Click here for our Anti Trojan Virus Downloads
|
|