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The Trojan horse is probably one of the
best-known events in ancient history. Although the story never actually occurred, the legend continues even down
to our day. There is another type of Trojan horse that is also well
known and that is the computer virus. This is a malicious
program that hides itself inside another program or file
that is masquerading as something good. Only after the infected
file is activated in some way will the virus become
active and infect your computer. There are so many different things
that it can do to your PC, and all of
them are bad. Here are some of the more malicious things that
this kind of malware can do to your computer.
Your computer is actually more vulnerable than
you may think. The file systems that run your computer and operate
everything from Windows to your music player all rely on a
structured file system. If the system somehow becomes corrupted
then things will stop working. One of the most malicious things
that a virus can do is to alter some of these files and
cause your system to be inoperable. It can also alter the files in
such a way that it takes over your computer and either lock you out
or runs in the background doing things that you are not even aware
of.
Many people use their computers for personal
information. They login to various websites, do their banking
online and pay bills. Once a Trojan becomes activated
it can install what is known as a keystroke logger. What a
keystroke logger does is to watch everything that you type and send
that information on to someone else. It recognizes when you are
logging in to certain websites and can steal all of your data from
login and password information to credit card numbers. Typically
this information is sent either to an e-mail address or uploaded to
a database where it can be sorted and used for various tasks later.
Just because a Trojan horse is infecting your
system doesn't mean that it's active all the time. Some of these viruses are what is known as time bombs. These spread
themselves throughout the Internet infecting as many computers and
servers as possible but they all become active at the same exact
time. Most of the times this is in order to do what are known as
denial of service attacks on a server. The infected computers will
continually try to access the server and crash it. This is
typically done without the infected computer user ever even knowing
that it is going on.
This is only really a sampling of some of the
many things that a Trojan horse virus can do to your system. The
best way to avoid having problems with them is not
to activate any file that you are unfamiliar with. A virus does not have the ability to install itself, so as long as you
don't open to anything you are uncomfortable with you will more than
likely never have problems with them.
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