Understanding The Trojan Horse

The Trojan Horse, as you might have guessed gets its name from the Trojan Horse used in the Trojan war. A Trojan Horse in computing terms works in pretty much the same way as the original Trojan horse. It first appears to be something of value to the user but when opened or executed, it is something completely different entirely. Some Trojan applications are attached to legitimate applications such as games and utilities which continue to work in the way they’re supposed to. If you receive one of these, the chances are that you won’t even realise you have a Trojan running. The tell tale sign used to be running an application that when clicked / executed appeared to do absolutely nothing, although with Trojans now appearing as legitimate applications, they’re becoming harder to spot.

There have been numerous, well publicised computer Trojan horses over the past 10 years or so. The most common two were BackOrifice and NetBus. These two trojan horse applications, when executed, allowed the sender to gain access to the remote computer. Once the hacker has access, they’re able to edit / delete files amongst other things.

Trojan horses these days are fairly uncommon. This is mainly down to advances in virus protection software being able to detect such bolt ons to seemingly normal applications but more so, the fact that users, particularly online are more savvy and will definitely think twice before accepting and opening an executable file from someone they don’t know. Of course, the more intelligent Trojan horse applications have taken this into account and in some cases, distribute themselves whilst pretending to be being sent from someone you know. Luckily most operating systems will warn you several times before allowing you to open such a file.

Most Trojan horse applications are geared towards the home user and the Windows operating system. Companies seldom suffer from Trojan attacks as a whole.