Trojan Horses

Trojan horse got its name from the Trojan War, which occurred thousands of years back. In the war, Greek invaders gave up the territory of Troy. However, they left behind a wooden horse as voiceless gift. When the excited Trojans found the horse, they drove it right into their city. But little did they know that there were Greek soldiers hidden in the wooden horse. They slowly got out of the horse and ed the city gates, letting in Greek soldiers, who destroyed the Trojans. That art of war was the scheme of Willy Odysseus, the then Greek ruler (Gozzi 80-84).

Trojans are malicious codes. They are not categorized as viruses because they do not replicate by invading other files. These programs undertake unwanted operations in computers. Besides tampering with or corrupting computer data, they provide a means through which unauthorized computers can access computer systems of an individual or organization. Like the Greek soldiers who were hidden in the wooden horse, Trojans are considered harmful as they cannot be easily detected. They disguise themselves underneath other programs, making it futile to look for them (Khan 8-12).

Trojan programs are used by their developers to destroy information stored in computer systems of organizations and individuals. For instance, Explore. Zip’, a Trojan program first detected in Israel, spread allover the globe like bushfire, erasing hundreds of thousands of corporate computers such as AT&T and Boeing (Gozzi 80-84).

It is remembered that the Trojan horse surfaced as an attachment to an email message. The messages would come from emails of people they knew. However, the attachments contained folders or files ending with the suffix .exe’, meaning the files were executable. Once the executable files were allowed to run, they would let in subprograms which performed the task of erasing data stored in the infected computer systems. Further, the sub programs would create a copy of them and store them in an unspecified location within the system (Gozzi 80-84).

Works Cited

Gozzi, R. The Trojan Horse Metaphor. Computer Virus Mythology, 57 (2000): 80-84. 16 Oct.     2012 <http://www.ebscohost.com>.

Khan, I. An Introduction to Computer Viruses: Problems and Solutions. Library HI Tech             News 29 (2012): 8-12. 16 Oct. 2012 <http://www.emeraldinsight.com.>.