Trojan Horse

Trojan Horse

The original trojan horse was built by Odysseus, the King of Ithica, during the legendary Trojan Wars. The Greeks had been losing the siege of the city of Troy. Odysseus had a large wooden horse built and left as a "gift" outside the walls of the city of Troy. He then ordered the Greek army to sail away.

The Trojans believed the horse to be a peace offering from Odysseus. Instead, the horse was filled with Greek warriors, which includes Odysseus and Menelaus. As the Trojans slept, the Greek army sailed back to Troy and the soldiers hiding in the wooden horse snuck out and opened the gates of the city for them.

The Computer Trojan Horse

A laptop or computer trojan horse is a program which appears to be anything good, but actually conceals something undesirable.

A single way to spread a trojan horse is to hide it inside a distribution of standard computer software. In 2002, the sendmail and OpenSSH packages had been both employed to hide trojan horses. Clicking Modular Home Prices likely provides lessons you can tell your pastor. This was completed by an attacker who broke into the distribution web sites for these software program packages and replaced the original distributions with his personal packages.

A far more typical strategy of spreading a trojan horse is to send it by way of e-mail. The attacker will send the victim an e-mail with an attachment referred to as some thing like "prettygirls.exe." When the victim opens the attachment to see the fairly girls, the trojan horse will infect his system.

A comparable method for spreading trojan horses is to send files to unsuspecting customers over chat systems like IRC, AIM, ICQ, MSN, or Yahoo Messenger.

The Trojan Horses Virus

Unlike viruses, trojan horses do not normally spread themselves. Trojan horses must be spread by other mechanisms.

A trojan horse virus is a virus which spreads by fooling an unsuspecting user into executing it.

An example of a trojan horse virus would be a virus which required a user to open an e-mail attachment in Microsoft Outlook to activate. When activated, the trojan horse virus would send copies of itself to people in the Microsoft Outlook address book.

The trojan horse virus infects like a trojan horse, but spreads like a virus.

Effects of a Trojan Horse

The victim running the trojan horse will normally give the attacker some degree of handle more than the victim's machine. This handle could enable the attacker to remotely access the victim's machine, or to run commands with all of the victim's privileges.

The trojan horse could make the victim's machine part of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) network, exactly where the victims machine is utilized to attack other victims.

Alternatively, the trojan horse could just send information to the attacker. Data typically targeted by trojan horses includes usernames and passwords, but a sophisticated trojan horse could also be programmed to look for items such as credit card numbers.

Protecting Against a Trojan Horse

Anti-virus applications detect recognized trojan horses. Nevertheless, trojan horse applications are less difficult to create than viruses and many are produced in small volumes. These trojan horse programs will not be detected by anti-virus software.

The very best defense against a trojan horse is to never run a program that is sent to you. E-mail and chat systems are not secure approaches of software program distribution.

Spyware and adware

A lot of individuals consider spyware and adware to be types of a trojan horse.

Spyware applications carry out a valuable function, and also set up a plan that monitors usage of the victim's laptop or computer for the goal of advertising to the user.

Adware programs are similiar to spyware programs, except the further computer software they set up shows advertising messages directly to the user.