What is a trojan

Trojan infections are increasing all the time, but many of the people who are infected with trojans do not fully understand what a remote access trojan is, or the functions they can perform.

When people think of trojans, they normally think of a huge wooden horse that the Greeks gifted the city of Troy in which they had secretly hidden their warriors. Computer trojans are based on the same idea; they appear to be harmless when often they harbour a secret malicious backdoor letting in hackers.

Most trojans are not viruses, meaning they do not have the ability to reproduce themselves; they rely on the deceptiveness of people to propagate them in the wild.

The second type of trojan is a file server trojan; these trojans create a file server, usually an ftp server on the remote victims computer allowing a hacker to upload or download files, this is commonly used to upload a powerful remote administration trojan. Because some of these file server trojans are small, (some are just 8 kbs) they are easily bound to other files making no significant size change. These are most commonly found in games and funny programs that people send around the internet to amuse each other not realising they are infecting them selves and there friends with trojans.

The third type of trojan is the password sending trojans, these trojans have one purpose and that is to steal passwords from the victim's computer and send them back to the hacker, the most common way these trojans communicate with the hacker is by email. Its pretty scary to think that your computer is sending a hacker secret emails with all your passwords.

Fourth on the list is key logger trojans; these trojans log everything the victim types and either sends the info to the hacker by way of email or stores the typed info in a secret file located on the victims computer which the hacker then downloads using the client part of the trojan

The fifth type of trojan is probably one of the most disturbing types to be recently developed; this is the distributed denial of service trojans or DDoS. A hacker infects a large number of victims with a DDoS trojan, then using the client part of the trojan he can connect either to all of them at once or he sends his commands to a drone (a master server) that then sends the commands out to all the victims to attack a single website or persons pc. These types of trojans have been used recently to bring down big sites like yahoo.com