What is a Trojan?

What are trojans? How do I use them? How do I know if I have one on my PC? Where do I get them?These are some of the many questions which we get all the time. I thouhgtthe best introductionary tutorial would to explain what the little blighters actually ARE.Trojans,

What are trojans?
How do I use them?
How do I know if I have one on my PC?
Where do I get them?

These are some of the many questions which we get all the time. I thouhgtthe best introductionary tutorial would to explain what the little blighters actually ARE.

Trojans, also known as backdoors (although not for the same reason) get their name from the mythologialbattle which was won by the Trojans of Troy.
They gave their enemy a gigantic wooden horse, as an offering of peace.
What their enemy didne know, was that there were hundreds if troopsinside the horse which were to come out and slit their throats during that night.

That's the old and basic stuff. Trojans nowadays are not really that different. They are programs which are taken intothe PC by the user and then run. Upon, and ONLY UPON running the program, you open up your PC to any users that hae the IP and port that the torjan is running, and client software, with which tocommunicate with your PC.

These are the criterion for contracting such a virus:
You get an infected program from somewhere, not native to your PC.
You RUN the program.

If youknow this has happened, and you know your are infected, get of the net immediately, and get some antivirus programs and/or firewalls.

You see, the only way a person can hack your PC, is if they areon another PC, and have a means of direct connection. As soon as you get Firewalls/Full Proxies/Port Blockers in the way, there is no problem, cos the ""hacker"" cant get to you.

Another thing: Trojans atually have to be running to work. If they arent running, or you disable their start up mechanism, you're safe again.

So when are you at risk?

Wellbasically any time when you're on the net. Windows as it stands is riddled with loopholes and bugs which allow hackers to come on in, if they are familiar with the architecture.
One way tostopthis is to get a good firewall.
There are lots of ""firewalls"" Some are big, PC sized machines, some are 5-20mb programs and the others are 500kb programs. You will only everwant to be dealing with the first 2 types.
The third wil only be poorly formed port blockers. They are the wart on the bell end of eternity, and should have never been existed.
The Second kind aresoftware dynamic firewalls. They are the best and cheapest method for keeping unwanted nasties out of your PC. One I can reccommend is BlackICE as it's done the best overall for me.
The first type areknow as hardware firewalls. These are grat big hefty things which have ROMS inside dedicated to sifting though network traffic, and stopping anything that could be nasty from entering the rest of the network.Ifyou didnt know what these were, dont worry about it, you'll probably have to use/meet one.