Trojan horse

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n.
  1. A subversive group or device placed within enemy ranks.
  2. The hollow wooden horse in which, according to legend, Greeks hid and gained entrance to Troy, later opening the gates to their army.
  3. Computer Science. A program that appears to be legitimate but is designed to have destructive effects, as to data residing in the computer onto which the program was loaded.

A program that appears legitimate, but performs some illicit activity when it is run. It may be used to locate password information or make the system more vulnerable to future entry or simply destroy programs or data on the hard disk. A Trojan is similar to a virus, except that it does not replicate itself. It stays in the computer doing its damage or allowing somebody from a remote site to take control of the computer. Trojans often sneak in attached to a free game or other utility. For information about various Trojans that are spread on the Internet, visit the Lockdown Corporation at www.lockdowncorp.com. See Trojan dropper, wiretap Trojan, rootkit, RAT, Back Orifice, NetBus, PrettyPark, Talking Trojan and virus.

The Trojan Horse

Trojan comes from Greek mythology, in which the Greeks battled the Trojans (people of Troy). After years of being unable to break into the fortified city, the Greeks built a wooden horse, filled it with soldiers and pretended to sail away. After the Trojans brought the horse into the city, the Greek soldiers crept out at night, opened the gates of Troy to the returning soldiers, and Troy was destroyed.

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[coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] A malicious security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses! See back door, virus, worm, phage, mockingbird.


1. Greek mythology a hollow wooden statue of a horse in which the Greeks concealed themselves in order to enter Troy.

2. a person or thing intended secretly to undermine or bring about the downfall of an enemy or opponent: the rebels may use this peace accord as a Trojan horse to try and take over.

3. Computing a program designed to breach the security of a computer system while ostensibly performing some innocuous function.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

n. a kind of malicious software that arrives at a personal computer embedded in some other software and then introduces routines that can gather personal information or destroy the operationality of the computer.  The consultant called the intruder a "trojan horse" and said I needed yet another program to get rid of it.

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Trojan horse (computing)

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Beast control program. Beast is a Windows-based backdoor Trojan horse sitting invisibly in infected computer and this program gives full control of that computer.

A Trojan horse, or Trojan, is a standalone malicious file or program that does not attempt to inject itself into other files unlike a computer virus and often masquerades as a legitimate file or program. Trojan horses can make copies of themselves, steal information, or harm their host computer systems.[1] The term is derived from the Trojan Horse story in Greek mythology because the first and many current Trojan horses attempt to appear as helpful programs. Others rely on drive-by downloads in order to reach target computers.

The term is derived from the Trojan Horse story in Greek mythology because Trojan horses employ a form of “social engineering,” presenting themselves as harmless, useful gifts, in order to persuade victims to install them on their computers (just as the Trojans were tricked into taking the Trojan Horse inside their gates).[2][3][4][5][6]

Contents

Purpose and uses

A Trojan may give a hacker remote access to a targeted computer system. Once a Trojan has been installed on a targeted computer system, hackers may be given remote access to the computer allowing them to perform all kinds of operations. Operations that could be performed by a hacker on a targeted computer system may include but are not limited to:

Trojan horses in this way may require interaction with a hacker to fulfill their purpose, though the hacker does not have to be the individual responsible for distributing the Trojan horse. It is possible for individual hackers to scan computers on a network using a port scanner in the hope of finding one with a malicious Trojan horse installed, which the hacker can then use to control the target computer.[8]

A recent innovation in Trojan horse code takes advantage of a security flaw in older versions of Internet Explorer and Google Chrome to use the host computer as an anonymizer proxy to effectively hide internet usage. A hacker is able to view internet sites while the tracking cookies, internet history, and any IP logging are maintained on the host computer. The host's computer may or may not show the internet history of the sites viewed using the computer as a proxy. The first generation of anonymizer Trojan horses tended to leave their tracks in the page view histories of the host computer. Newer generations of the Trojan horse tend to "cover" their tracks more efficiently. Several versions of Slavebot have been widely circulated in the US and Europe and are the most widely distributed examples of this type of Trojan horse.[8]

Current use

Due to the popularity of botnets among hackers and the availability of advertising services that permit authors to violate their users' privacy, Trojan horses are becoming more common. According to a survey conducted by BitDefender from January to June 2009, "Trojan-type malware is on the rise, accounting for 83-percent of the global malware detected in the world." This virus has a relationship with worms as it spreads with the help given by worms and travel across the internet with them.[9]

Their main purpose is to make its host system open to access through the internet.

BitDefender also states that approximately 15% of computers are members of a botnet - usually an effect of a Trojan infection.[10]

Popular Trojan horses

  • Netbus (by Carl-Fredrik Neikter)
  • Subseven (by Mobman)
  • Y3K Remote Administration Tool (by Konstantinos & Evangelos Tselentis)
  • Back Orifice (Sir Dystic)
  • Beast
  • Zeus
  • The Blackhole exploit kit[11]
  • Flashback Trojan (Trojan.BackDoor.Flashback)

See also

References

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ Landwehr, C. E; A. R Bull, J. P McDermott, W. S Choi (1993). "A taxonomy of computer program security flaws, with examples". DTIC Document. http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA465587. Retrieved 2012-04-05. 
  3. ^ "Trojan Horse Definition". http://www.techterms.com/definition/trojanhorse. Retrieved 2012-04-05. 
  4. ^ "Trojan horse". Webopedia. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/T/Trojan_horse.html. Retrieved 2012-04-05. 
  5. ^ "What is Trojan horse? - Definition from Whatis.com". http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/Trojan-horse. Retrieved 2012-04-05. 
  6. ^ "Trojan Horse: [coined By MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards N."]. http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/291162_trojan-horse-coined-by-mit-hacker-turned-nsa-spook-dan-edwards-n.html. Retrieved 2012-04-05. 
  7. ^ http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Carberp-trojan-generated-Lb2-8-million-1477413.html
  8. ^ a b Jamie Crapanzano (2003): "Deconstructing SubSeven, the Trojan Horse of Choice", SANS Institute, Retrieved on 2009-06-11
  9. ^ BitDefender.com Malware and Spam Survey
  10. ^ Datta, Ganesh. "What are Trojans?". SecurAid. http://securaid.com/index.php/windows/trojans. 
  11. ^ Burt, Jeffrey (2012-04-19). "HP: Fewer but More Dangerous Software Security Vulnerabilities". eWeek.com. Ziff Davis. http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Security/HP-Fewer-but-More-Dangerous-Software-Security-Vulnerabilities-819706/. Retrieved 2012-04-20. "[...] Web exploit kits continued to be popular in 2011. HP pointed to the Blackhole Exploit Kit, which officials said is used by most hackers and hit an infection rate of more than 80 percent in late November 2011." 

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malware (computer jargon)
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mockingbird (computer jargon)
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