When the original Trojan Horse was gifted by the Greeks to the Trojans, it was accepted as a peace offering and taken into the city without a second thought. But, in the middle of the night, the Greek army hidden inside it attacked the unsuspecting Trojans and destroyed the city. Similar to the method used in this snippet of ancient history, the technological Trojan acts to destroy files in a computer after getting into it through seemingly harmless means.

The Trojan malware in computing was first found in 2002, when OpenSSH and SendMail packages were infected. This initial spreading was done by a hacker who broke into distribution websites and substituted the original files with infected versions. After this incident, downloads became the easiest way to spread viruses among internet users. That’s why most software downloads and subsequent installations are now subjected to intense scrutiny by malware scanners.

Another common way of spreading various Trojan Horse infections is email. Since people are naturally curious, the sender uses enticing file names to attract your attention and make you open the file. Other popular methods of spreading Trojan Horses are through instant messenger programs and shared files. One important fact to keep in mind is that a Trojan Horse can’t spread by itself. It needs the user to take action on the file, which means if you receive a Trojan and you click on it, it’ll spread. But, if you ignore it and remove it from your system, you have no problems.

Strictly speaking, a Trojan is not a virus. Viruses are known to replicate themselves and spread through infection within a single system and eventually spread to connected systems. Trojan Horses rely on end-users to spread around. Trojan Horses are not always malicious, although the majority are. They are best known to be back-door programs, which means they allow another person to bypass authentication to a computer and remotely access it for their own use, while remaining undetected.

As of now, Trojans are classified into six types ? downloader, denial-of-service attack, remote access, security software disabler, server Trojan and data destruction. They are named according to the kind of actions they take. This can range from corrupting your files, overwriting your data, ,encrypting your files, allowing unauthorized access to your computer from remote location and stealing private data to harvesting any email addresses on your computer, spying on you, interfering with your programs and shutting down your system.

Even if it is just about impossible to detect a Trojan infection manually, you can remove and stop a Trojan attack using your anti-virus program or your anti-spyware. If you can?t remove it, then the Trojan Horse has probably attached itself to a legitimate program or file. If this is the case, you can usually get rid if it in the safe mode.

To avoid infection by a Trojan Horse, the wisest thing to do is to never open files you have no reason to trust and to be very careful of what you download ? always scan before opening. Your malware scanners should always be updated scrupulously ? then they can get rid of any malware that might get into your computer.