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Many people are familiar with the story of the
giant wooden horse that was left outside of the city of Troy by the Greek
army. Unfortunately, many more people are all too familiar with the
Trojan horse virus that has infected more computers than anybody
knows. Just like the horse that was left outside of Troy, this virus comes in
a form that looks like something good. The
problem is that it causes the person to open the program and when
they do that bad things start to happen. Where exactly did this
kind of spyware come from, and what kind of harm can it do to your
computer?
The idea of a malicious computer virus is really
nothing new. It was discussed about 25 years ago at a conference in
which they were talking about malicious code piggybacking on a UNIX
login. Nobody had computers in their home at that time, and almost
nobody had even heard of the Internet. Now that almost every home
has a personal computer in it, we are all too familiar with Trojans and what they can do.
The modern Trojan horse virus that we are familiar with
came into existence in the last six to ten years. They were
attached to things such as e-mails, downloadable files, files on
floppy disk and sometimes hidden in reputable programs. Most of the
time they come hidden inside of files that looks like
something you would want to open. For example; you could get an
e-mail that has a file attachment with the name of sexygirl.jpg.
Many people will open this file simply because they are curious to
see what it is. Whenever this file is opened, however, the virus that is attached to it becomes active and the damage is
done.
A computer virus depends on the user to
activate it. There are different types of viruses that travel from
computer to computer and are self replicating and activate
themselves once inside. That isn't the case with a Trojan.
You must activate the program that it is attached to in order for it
to do the damage. You can have a file that contains a virus on your computer and as long as you don't double-click on that
file it will remain harmless.
Once activated they can do any
one of several things. Many times they will open a backdoor and allow
other viruses and malicious programs to be installed on your
computer. Sometimes they will install a keystroke logger in order to
steal your username and passwords, and sometimes even your credit
card number. The worst of them will destroy
part of your file system on your hard drive, rendering it
inoperable.
The best defense against any kind of computer virus is
a good offense. Whenever you download a file always run a virus
check and make sure that your definitions are up to date. If
you are in doubt about something that you receive in an e-mail
simply delete it. Remember that the big wooden gift horse looked good to the
people of the city of Troy, but it was very bad on the inside. A
Trojan horse virus is so named because it acts the very same way.
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