Trojan Horse

What is Trojan horse?

A Trojan horse is a computer program that disguise to being something else which is look like harmless, but actually contains or installs a malicious program. These malicious programs may appear to be a useful program to an unsuspecting user, but are actually harmful once executed.

There are two common types of Trojan horses. One is the useful software, like weather alerting programs, computer clock setting software, and peer to peer file sharing utilities, that have been inserted with malicious code by a hacker. This corrupted useful software when run would execute the malicious code and inflect harmful effect to the user. The other type is a standalone program that masquerades as something else, like a game or image file, in order to trick the user into some misdirected complicity that is needed to carry out the program's objectives.

How it's spread?

Trojan horse programs cannot operate autonomously, in contrast to some other types of malware, like viruses or worms. Trojan horse programs depend on actions by the intended victims. As such, if trojans replicate and even distribute themselves, each new victim must run the program/Trojan. Therefore their virulence is of a different nature, depending on successful implementation of social engineering concepts rather than flaws in a computer system's security design or configuration

The majority of Trojan horse infections occur because the user was tricked into running an infected program. This is why it is advised to not open unexpected attachments on emails -- the program is often a cute animation or a sexy picture, but behind the scenes it infects the computer with a Trojan or worm. The infected program doesn't have to arrive via email, though; it can be sent to you in an Instant Message, downloaded from a Web site or by FTP, or even delivered on a CD or floppy disk. Furthermore, an infected program could come from someone who sits down at your computer and loads it manually.

How to remove it?

Method of remove Trojan horse varies, due to they takes a variety of forms. Sometime you may manual remove by delete the corrupted files and temp files. Other difficult one, you need to do registry editing.

Safe computer tips

Never download and install software from an unknown source

Beware freeware and shareware software

If you want to install the software make sure it comes from a reliable source