What Is a Trojan Horse Attack?
For the novice PC user (or even an experienced one!), detecting and avoiding all possible attacks on your computer seems nearly impossible. As long as your machine is connected to the Internet, there is always the possibility of contracting some online threat, whether it is a worm, virus or Trojan horse. Read on and learn about Trojan horse attacks, guarding against them and what to do if your computer is infected.
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Trojan Horse History
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Students of history will have some understanding of the mechanics behind a Trojan horse attack. The Trojan horse was a large, hollowed-out wooden sculpture given as a gift to the city of Troy by the Greeks. Inside, however, members of the Greek army were hidden, and when the horse was brought within the city gates, they staged an attack to defeat their enemies and capture the city. In computing terms, a Trojan horse refers to a malicious program that appears disguised as something harmless, such as a music or video file.
Trojan Horse Attack
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A Trojan horse attack can be designed to accomplish any number of goals, but typically the intent is either pecuniary gain or spreading mayhem. For example, upon bringing the infected file onto your hard drive, the Trojan horse program might locate and send your bank information to the developer. Or it might just bog down your computer with needless files, slowing the system to a halt and eventually causing a crash. The only limit to what a Trojan horse attack can accomplish is dependent on the limits of the developer's imagination and talent.
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Guard Against Attacks
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Constant vigilance is the name of the game here. To prevent a Trojan horse attack from succeeding, you must never download any content unless you completely trust both the source of the file and the file itself. A Trojan horse can be disguised as any type of file, but it must execute to cause damage to your computer. To that end, the final extension of a Trojan file will be something like .exe, .vbs, .com, or .bat. Always check the file extension before opening any file, and never open files or click random links blindly.
Removing a Trojan Horse
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The only way to guarantee 100 percent that your computer is no longer infected is to perform a full format of the hard drive and a clean system install. This is a tiresome process, but it just might be exactly what is required to (1) remove the Trojan and (2) convince you to be more careful in the future. Other possible solutions include anti-virus and anti-Trojan software, but remember that Trojan horse attacks are evolving faster than the software to eliminate them, so no program is fail-safe.
Considerations
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Developers who write Trojan horse programs make their living off of others' inattentiveness and ignorance. Just as a mugger in a bad part of town preys on those who get lost in his neighborhood, so too will Trojan horse attacks come when you are clicking from site to site wholly unaware of where you are headed and what actions you have taken. Taking the time to scan files and download only from trusted sites might be cumbersome, but it beats the alternative of having an infected machine.
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