Monday, April 25, 2005
A Trojan horse program tricks you into loading and running it by pretending to be something that it's not. (Surely you remember this story from Greek mythology.) The perfect example of a Trojan horse is a file that masquerades as an antivirus software patch but is really a virus.
Some Trojan horses are coupled with other types of viruses, such as macro viruses, which then generate new Trojan horses that get passed along to others.
The most famous example of a Trojan horse is the Melissa virus, which took the computer world by storm on March 26, 1999. Melissa arrived as an e-mail message with a Word document attached. Anyone foolish enough to open the attachment soon found out that the document was a Trojan horse for the macro virus embedded within the attached Word document.
Some Trojan horses are coupled with other types of viruses, such as macro viruses, which then generate new Trojan horses that get passed along to others.
The most famous example of a Trojan horse is the Melissa virus, which took the computer world by storm on March 26, 1999. Melissa arrived as an e-mail message with a Word document attached. Anyone foolish enough to open the attachment soon found out that the document was a Trojan horse for the macro virus embedded within the attached Word document.
