Trojanhorse

toc =What is a Trojan Horse?=

A Trojan Horse is a disastrous program that masquerades as a benign application. It consists of two parts, a server and a host file. A user will open the server on their system and unknowingly install a backdoor trojan horse, which allows other users (the host) to access and obtain complete control of the system. It differs in comparision to viruses because it does not replicate, but instead it can prove to be even more dangerous.

=Origin of Term=

The term Trojan horse comes from the Greek story of the Trojan War. When the Greeks were at War with the Trojans, Greece gave a giant wooden horse to the Trojans as a peace offering. When the Trojans brought the horse inside their city, the soldiers inside the wooden horse came out at night and opened the main gate of the city. The Greeks now had access to the city (computer) and began to destroy and take over everything they could get their hands on. This led to the successful overtaking of Troy.

=Types of Trojan Horse=

There are two common types of Trojan horses. One, is otherwise useful software that has been crooked by a Cracker inserting malicious code that executes while the program is used. Examples include various implementations of weather alerting programs, computer clock setting software, and peer to peer file sharing utilities. The other type is a individual program that masquerades as something else, like a game or image file, in order to trick the user into some misdirected complicity that is needed to carry out the program's objectives. Trojan horse programs cannot operate autonomously, in contrast to some other types of malware, like virus or worms. It is considered the most dangerous of all illicit malware because it gives a hacker complete control over the infected system.

=External Links=

[|Symantec Security Response of Trojan horse]

=Work Citied=

"Trojan Horse." __Symantec__. 23 Aug. 2005. Symantec. 23 Feb. 2006 .

"Trojan Horse." __Internet.com Webopedia__. 18 Feb. 2005. Internet.com. 23 Feb. 2006 .

"Trojan horse." __Wikipedia__. 23 Feb. 2006 <[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_horse_%28computing])>.