You must have encountered the word Trojan many a times when your anti virus or your Anti Spam ware runs a scan through your system. These Trojan are high lighted as critical danger, but you have no clue of how they entered your computer. Here a comprehensive view about Trojan horses:

  • Trojans are basically viruses which make a back door entry, which is allowed by the user unknowingly. They are usually hidden under emails, attachments which lure users stating it as gifts, then messages and links on Social Networking sites, which when visited trigger the attack of Trojans. A Trojan is made of two programs. One program is called Client and the other is called Server. The Client is not stored on the user’s computer, while server is stored on the user’s computer.
  • The client is used by the hacker to control the victim’s computer, and is installed on the hacker’s side. Once the Server program is executed it will provide information to the client program upon request. This server program once installed hides itself on your computer and will run automatically every time you start the computer. It does not replicate within the system, and so it is easy to catch it using many sophisticated anti virus soft wares also.
  • It opens up the ports, which allows the hacker to get into your system. They are named after the Greek myth, where in the Greek used a Trojan Wooden horse to get into Troy and then destroyed the city, with the help of soldiers hidden in the horse. Similarly these Trojans seem to be desirable at first site, but contain unwanted and harmful malwares to affect your system. These Trojans cannot get into your system by way of pop ups as the ad wares do. They are to be activated by the users by downloading files on its systems. As in when you download files using P2P software and Torrent Soft ware. These files contains executable .EXE files, which when played are unresponsive, but in the back ground they have started their work.
  • They are not designed to harm the system, but still vital information such as Website passwords, credit card details, which are then sold by the hacker at a price in the black market over internet. Firstly the creator writes a code, and disguises it as something other than a damaging program. Then it is uploaded on websites for download. They might arrive as an email attachment and masquerade as a screen saver, a program update, or a graphics file. When a user receives the email message, he believes the attachment is a nice “gift” and double-clicks it, “inviting” the Trojan horse onto his computer system. This software then opens the system to a backdoor attack. The installed software allows the Trojan horses to be installed. Then the hacker can access the user’s files and programs. For instance, the hacker might steal the user’s financial data. The cracker also might use the system as a zombie, launching DoS (denial of service) attacks on a large server or Web site.

Great are the implications of a Trojan Horse attack, so be vigil and download only secured items for the internet after going through a security scan.