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Trojans (Trojan Horses)

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What are Trojans?

These are programs that are usually placed on your computer without your permission, they quite often are sent to victims via e-mail, ICQ file transfer or being downloaded directly from the internet. Installed Trojans act a servers and attempt to contact a remote client and once contact is established the trojan can be controlled by the remote client.

What's do they do?

Different Trojan's do different things, some record what keys you press (used to try and capture passwords etc) and then send this information to the client controlling the trojan others can capture screen images, others can delete files, send you messages from the person controlling the server, they can even transmit files from your hard drive. Some infamous Trojans you might already have heard of like Sub7, Back Orrifice, and NetBus allow almost total control of your computer allowing a remote user access to do almost anything that you can do, but from their remote client.

What can I do to protect myself?

Use a Firewall for a start (since your here your already reading using one, hopefully! :-) ) to block Trojans from being able to transmit. Don't open an e-mail attachment just because the sender claims to be a 'friend', if you are not sure that it has come from your 'friend' ask them before you open it. Get Windows to show you all file extensions, some times files will be sent to you with false extensions. Windows will by default hide known file extensions so you may think the attachment is an image because it's called picture.jpg, but if you have Windows set to hide known file types it may actually be picture.jpg.exe! (an executable with .jpg in it's name but because Windows recognizes .exe as a filetype it is hiding the extension making you think it's an image). Don't rely on your AV to pick up the Trojan, most Anti-Viruses are crap at detecting Trojans, get yourself a good Anti-Trojan.

For more Information:

Google search for Trojan Exploits
Trojan Horses - What are they and what to do about it?
Trojan Horses
What is a Trojan anyway?
Wilders - Anti-Trojan

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This is an unofficial guide, the information expressed here may differ from Agnitum's. There is a support forum (no longer run by Agnitum, but by users) if you need more help this is a good place to start. Where information here conflicts with what Agnitum have told you always go with the information given to you by Agnitum.

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