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Trojan Horse or Trojan is
a malware that infects a computer without the user's knowledge and
does malicious activities like stealing sensitive information,
formatting disks, corrupting data, degrading system performance etc.
The name Trojan is derived from the
ancient Greek wooden horse that the Greeks used to invade Troy
stealthily. Trojan programs generally tricks a user by some form of
social engineering and get loaded and executed into the system. They
often misrepresent themselves to appear useful, routine or interesting
to the user and persuades the user to install it.
Unlike worms or viruses, they cannot
inject themselves to other files or self-replicate.
If installed with elevated privileges,
Trojans get unlimited access to the computer and do much destructive
activities. This includes :
- data corruption
- formatting of disks
- crashing the computer
- spreading malware to other computers in network with the help of an infected computer
- steal sensitive information, like login information, bank account and credit card passwords etc.
- Spy on user activities
- use the infected computers as a botnet and using their computational resources for doing some illegal activities
- install ransomware and extort money
- keystroke logging
- controlling the computer system remotely
Some common types of Trojans
Let's look at a few types of Trojans to
understand in a better way how it affects us.
Backdoor
This type of
Trojans give the attacker remotes control over the computer after
infecting it. This controls may be data corruption, system crash,
rebooting computer, displaying attacker controlled data etc.
Sometimes, attackers even use the infected computers as a botnet and
use their resources for criminal purposes.
Exploit
This type of Trojans
infect a computer and searches for vulnerabilities of the programs or
software running on the system to control it further.
Rootkit
This type of Trojans
infect a computer and disables anti-virus or other security programs,
so that it can infect the computer further.
Trojan-Banker
They steal
sensitive user data like bank account passwords, credit card numbers
etc from the infected computer.
Trojan-DDoS
This type of
Trojans use the infected computers to perform a DDoS or Distributed
Denial of Service attack on a victim computer in the network.
Trojan-FakeAntiVirus
They
misrepresent themselves to appear a security program and often
reports that the computer is infected, though it is actually false.
Their main purpose is to appear useful to the user so that the user
installs it and gets infected by the Trojans.
Trojan-GameThief
They steal
account information for online gamers.
Trojan-InstantMessenger
They
steal login information of Instant Messaging users.
Trojan-Ransomware
The purpose of Trojan-Ransomware is to infect the computer and extort money
from the user.
Trojan-SMS
They cost the
user a huge amount of money by sending text messages to some premium
rate phone numbers without the user's knowledge.
Trojan-Spy
They spy on the
user using keylogger, webcam etc and collects sensitive data.
Trojan-MailFinder
They
harvest email addresses from the infected computer.
Trojan-Joke
They play
annoying sounds on the speaker or display taunting message on the
screen, but otherwise comparatively less harmful.
Countermeasures
- Trojans mostly uses some social engineering to infect a victim's computer. Do not click on any link if you are not very sure of its authenticity. Do not open email attachments if you are not sure of the sender. And, always avoid downloading software from untrusted sources.
- Trojans often exploit security vulnerabilities of commonly used software to infect a computer. So, always keep your computer updated with recent security patches of all the commonly used software.
- Update your Operating Systems with recent patches for the same reason.
- Always keep your system updated with recent patches of anti-malware programs from a trusted source.
- Configure Firewalls in your system properly.
This was an introductory article on
Trojans. Hope to keep you updated with more information from time to
time. Stay safe, stay protected.
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