A Trojan horse program has a useful and desired function, or at least it has the appearance of having such. Trojans use false and fake names to trick users into dismissing the processes. These strategies are often collectively termed social engineering. In most cases the program performs other, undesired functions, but not always. The useful, or seemingly useful, functions serve as camouflage for these undesired functions. A trojan is designed to operate with functions unknown to the victim. The kind of undesired functions are not part of the definition of a Trojan Horse; they can be of any kind, but typically they have malicious intent.
In practice, Trojan Horses in the wild often contain spying functions (such as a packet sniffer) or backdoor functions that allow a computer, unbeknownst to the owner, to be remotely controlled from the network, creating a "zombie computer". Because Trojan horses often have these harmful functions, there often arises the misunderstanding that such functions define a Trojan Horse.
In the context of Computer Security, the term 'Trojan horse' was first used in a seminal report edited/written by J. P Anderson (aka 'The Anderson Report', written approx. 1980) which credits Daniel Edwards for coinage.
The basic difference from computer viruses is: a Trojan horse is technically a normal computer program and does not possess the means to spread itself. Originally Trojan horses were not designed to spread themselves. They relied on fooling people to allow the program to perform actions that they would otherwise not have voluntarily performed.
Trojans and backdoors typically setup a hidden server, from which a hacker with a client can then log on to. They have become polymorphic, process injecting, prevention disabling, easy to use and therefore abuse.
Trojans of recent times also come as Computer Worm payloads. It is important to note that the defining characteristics of Trojans are that they require some user interaction, and cannot function entirely on their own nor can they self-propagate/replicate.
more trojan info: »DSL FAQ »What is a Trojan?
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last modified: 2006-08-11 01:31:11 |
