A gift with Evil Within

You are probably familiar with the story of the Trojan in ancient Greek. The definition of a Trojan cannot be further from the truth. A Trojan is a malicious program that comes disguised as legitimate software. Unlike a virus or a worm however, Trojans do not replicate. They do nevertheless enter a victims computer undetected and do a bunch of things such as accessing and gaining unrestricted access to data on the computer and causing damage to data. Hidden in code, a Trojan may be hard to detect without some special software. In most cases however, a Trojan will not cause damage, rather it is meant to spy and steal private as well as sensitive information. This could be credit card information, confidential documents, email passwords, web services passwords and others. Let us look at some Trojan examples out there you might encounter.

Some of the most publicized Trojans are backdoors. This is because these forms of malware offer an attacker total control of the machine. They exploit holes in the Microsoft operating system and are able to capture screen displays and keyboard inputs. Some of the backdoors have simple graphical interfaces for nearly anyone with malicious intent to deploy and use. Other forms of malware are data-sending Trojans. The purpose of these is to send to back a remote hacker such information as credit card details, chat logs and address lists. These forms of malware are able to do this by installing what are called key-loggers that simply send keystrokes to the hacker and he can then extract passwords from these. This information can either be sent to some email address or submitting a web-from to the hackers website.

There are also destructive Trojans that are meant to destroy and delete files. They can be programmed to act as time bombs that go off and start the deletion process on a set day and time. Because these are created purposely to attack a computer network, they are unlikely to be detected by an anti-virus program. Denial of service attack Trojans are meant to generate such heavy traffic on a network that it overwhelms the victims bandwidth causing access to the internet to be denied. Proxy Trojans attack a proxy server and make anonymous requests to any part of the world. Once a proxy is under attack, it can be used to launch attacks to any part of the world which can then be tracked back to that proxy. Others include security software disablers and rootkits. To ensure that you do not get hit by a Trojan, always have an anti-virus and an anti-spyware product that is always up-to-date. This is the best protection from these forms of malware.