Tojan Horse Replicate?

Computadora · June 2010

Does the trojan horse replicate like a worm/virus? From my understanding a trojan horse is viral code hidden in a legitimate program, is this correct?

Devilsbane · June 2010

According to mythology, the Trojan war was a war between the Greeks and the Trojans. It started because one of the Trojans took a beautiful Greek woman back to Troy with her. The Greeks followed and the battle commenced.

I don't remember much about the battle, but one day the Greeks built a giant wooden horse and rolled it up to the gate and then left. The Trojans saw this as a sign of surrender and eventually pushed it into their fortress and began to celebrate. When everyone was passed out/sleeping, the greeks opened a door in the horse and proceeded to kill all of the Trojans.

I hope I got the story right here, but what really matters is that the horse slipped in disguised as something else, which is how a trojan horse application got its name. A trojan horse could be a worm or a virus, depending on what a hacker has disguised to look like winword.exe.

dynamik · June 2010

Right, the key point to remember about a trojan is that it looks legitimate but also performs some malicious action. It certainly could perform some sort of replication (i.e. sending itself to the contacts it can scavenger from your computer), but that in itself isn't a defining characteristic of a trojan.

Computadora · June 2010

Thanks for the clarification/response dynamik.

redline5th · June 2010

A virus is much like a real virus... it will replicate and infect legitimate files.

A worm will replicate by itself through out a network.

Hope that's helpful!

Plantwiz · June 2010

The term 'Virus' has become the goto word folks use to describe malware, but a true 'virus' only applies to specific malicious code/files. The term takes its orgin much like a virus will infect a human...it is something that infects a 'host' (a host could be a boot sector, a file, etc..) then attempts to spread.

So Virus needs to
1 replicate
2 spread

Worms do not attach to host programs or file the way a virus will. A worm can stand alone and it doesn't need to alter files. It spreads (burrows) over networks.

Trojan Horse doesn't replicate itself and doesn't infect other files. As described above it hides within something that appears useful (screensavers and games are frequently used) and most commonly it installs a backdoor...generally for malicious deeds.

Tojan Horse Replicate?

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