HACKING 17 Most Dangerous Hacking Attacks (2017)

Chapter 15 – Trojans horse

You might be familiar with the story of Troy. According to the Green mythology what happened is the Greeks have tried to concur the city Troy for many years. However, it seems to be impossible. Then the Greeks have built a wooden horse having their best soldiers hiding inside and left it outside of the gates of Troy, making it appear as a gift. Once the wooden horse was inside Troy, the soldiers have been able to sneak inside of the city of Troy, and they were able to let in other soldiers from the inside of the gates.

When it comes to a computer virus called Trojan horse, also known as Trojan the concepts are very similar. A Trojan virus is very famous of being hidden inside a certain program, or file that might be a computer game, or software that is available for free download. Once the victim would download the piece of software to the computer, the Trojan would execute itself begin to do its purpose. As you remember the wooden horse created by the Greeks, the primary objective was not to be inside and destroy but allowing others inside first. Therefore the Trojan’s first move is often to disable the firewall or antivirus or often both of their functionality. Once the firewall is disabled, there would be backdoors created, and certain vulnerabilities would begin to become open for any intruders.

Some Trojan viruses are typically has been written for creating backdoors and letting in other malware such as spyware, or adware. However it all depends on the original purpose of the attacker, but most times, it is to have full control over the computer.

Having full control, could potentially making the victim’s computer to join to a botnet, or could cause even a Crypto-locker, and demand payment.

When I had a Trojan virus on my timeworn laptop around 2004, it was such a pain. I had no choice but to reinstall a new operating system, and I have lost all my files due to it’s earlier version of the virus, that had a purpose of destroying data. Black hat hackers and Cybercriminals have realized that having fun and utterly destroying computers has no meaning. Therefore the game has changed. Most Trojan nowadays has a purpose of some financial gain.

A later version of Trojan horse virus that was popular is having a Scareware installed on the computer. Scareware is real to scare victims, by popup messages, such as:

Your computer in danger, click here to scan for viruses!

So by clicking on a popup that seems like part of a Windows operating system, a fake antivirus would pop up, and begin to scan the computer for viruses. These are so fake that once you have experienced this, you just know that as it scans your computer in 5-10 seconds, then showing you lots of different kind of viruses that you should quarantine. However, when you try to isolate those bad viruses, you would be prompted to pay for the antivirus software such as 40 to 100 dollars one-time fee. Normally what happens is that once you would make a payment, you would be prompted to download the full software that would contain even more backdoors, such as adware or spyware, or even keystroke logger, but certainly not an excellent antivirus. As it would go on, you would be kept on prompted for additional issues on the computer. Examples are that you have a Trojan and that to be removed would require you to buy another software that is specifically for Trojan virus removal. It would be a never ending story. Therefore the best way often is to re-install the operating system, and next time be extra careful with drive-by-downloads, or anything that could be coming from an untrusted source. As I mentioned these types aren’t visible as much as they used to be as most Trojans, you wouldn’t even be aware that you have downloaded, and they would be most possibly connect computers for robot networks.

Researchers show that over 10% of all computers in the world are attached to a botnet, and it was due to Trojan virus that started the actual infection on those machines.

How to remove Trojan viruses

Removing viruses can be done, however Trojans might have infected some of the legit software-s that have been previously installed on the computer, therefore might be tough to do so. In fact, you can never be 100% sure that you have removed all the viruses from your computer. However, you can give it a go with a good Antivirus. What you have to do when you begin is to reboot your computer and start it in safe mode. It all depends on your operating system that you are running, however, once you are in safe mode, you may proceed to execute an antivirus by doing a full scan. Once complete, you should do a test and see if your computer gets any faster. Also, try multitasking with a lot better performance, and then you should do another additional full scan making sure there are no more viruses. As I mentioned before, Trojans can be a real pain, and you might never be able to fully remove them, therefore as I suggested earlier your best option might be to re-install a brand new operating system.