Never invite a Trojan horse to your online party. The Trojan Horse acquired its name from the Trojan War where the Greeks gave a giant wooden horse to the enemy, masquerading it as a jester of peace. When they pulled the over sized horse into the city walls and closed the gate, Greek soldiers would pop out of the hollow stomach and run to the city gate, opening it and allowing the rest of their army to come in, capturing the city of Troy.

This may have been a mythological story, but it is reality in the world of cyber space. A Trojan horse, often shortened to Trojan, is a software that appears to be beneficial, but as soon is you click run or install, your life will take a sharp turn toward the worse. A Trojan horse is malware, not a computer virus. It does not replicate itself like a virus. Two functions of a Trojan horse is to steal personal information and/or harm the computer system.

A hacker may access a computer remotely once the Trojan is installed. The hacker is often limited by user defined privileges. This is another reason to tightly lock your computer with security and administrative passwords.

A common mistake that I once fell for, was when a masqueraded Trojan horse was indicating that it found a computer virus in my system; the Trojan horse simulated a very short scan, and strongly recommended to click here to remove the virus. Once I clicked, my computer was introduced to a host of viruses. Fortunately I was able to remove the Trojan horse and all of the viruses with my reactive antivirus software on a boot scan.

The reason that I define certain antivirus software as reactive, is the fact that it did not detect the Trojan horse while it was knocking on my computer’s door. The proactive antivirus software that I currently use would have warned me about the intruder in plenty of time to sign out of the internet, and run a quick scan for preventative purposes. At least in my case,  the boot scan was able to eliminate the the Trojan and the viruses with my reactive antivirus software that I was currently using.

Hackers have taken advantage of a security flaw in older versions of Google Chrome and Internet Explorer by allowing them access to a computer through a Trojan horse: mostly to view questionable websites, allowing the tracking cookies and internet history to reside on the target computer. This is another reason to perform web browser updates as soon as they become available.

Other operations that could be performed remotely by a hacker using a Trojan horse are: Data theft, using botnet (automated spamming), downloading or uploading files, crashing the computer, watching the users screen, and keystroke logging. These are functions that are also performed by the worm.

I encourage you to leave a comment about anything related to helping others fight this war against computer and internet crime. Since I have been a victim of cyber crime myself, I have taken a proactive approach to inform others of the mistakes that I have made, thus preventing them from acquiring a Trojan horse or any other type of malware or virus threat.

Trojan horse

Trojan horse

Trojan horse