Dangerous Than the Epic – Trojan Horses

If you are familiar with Homer’s Odyssey, you know what it means by Trojan Horse. Yes, at least the concept. If you don’t know what’s there in Odyssey, let’s me explain you what happed there at Troy.

In Homer’s Odyssey, there exists a city called Troy, which has a wall that cannot be broken by the enemies. Therefore, Troy has been regarded as one of best cities in terms of security. Due to the same reason, no other kingdom would take the chance of fighting with Troy. But one king is going to Troy with thousands of ships for fighting with Troy but looses in the initial rounds of the war. Finally the attacking army pretends that they left the war and keeps a large wooden horse on the shore where Troy king takes it to the Troy city as a monument of the war. But apparently, there had been well trained soldiers hiding inside the wooden horse where they came out of the house and open the gates of Troy for the rest of the army to come in. Eventually Troy was burnt to ashes and it was a victory achieved by the Trojan horse.

Now you can relate the above epic to your computer by assuming Troy as your computer and Trojan Horse as a kind of virus. Troy’s wall is somewhat similar to your security system (anti-virus software or firewall) and Trojan Horse can surpass your security system by misleading it.

Let’s talk about what is exactly done by the modern Trojan horses to our computer systems. Let’s take Melissa, most popular Trojan Horse of all time as an example. First you may get an email with an attachment and the email is written in such a way that you would open the attachment. If the attachment is opened by the user, it would run a hidden macro without the user’s knowledge. If Microsoft Outlook is present in the user’s PC, Melissa will take first 50 contacts and mail itself to those 50 contacts. This way, Melissa could multiply rapidly within a very short period of time and soon the internet was full of Melissa emails. Since the demand was so high for email servers, most of them crashed causing more business damages. Eventually the anti-virus programs were updated to find and kill, Melissa.

I assume that, by now you understand the similarities between the epic and the modern Trojan Horse. It is very important to keep your virus scanner up-to-date for catching Viruses before they make any damage to you.