This help page is part of #new2mIRC/QualityNet. Please visit our home page at: http://fly.to/mongoose1
or the official
QualityNet HomePage at:
http://www.quality.grid9.net
A Trojan horse is defined by
FOLDOC as a "malicious, security-breaking program that
is disguised as something benign"
such as a screen saver, game, hack, nuke, etc. Instead,
running the file gives control
of your computer over to somebody else, who can now takeover
your IRC channels, steal account
passwords, modify/erase files on your disk, use your
computer to perform felonious
denial of service attacks on others, or worse! Trojans are
not the same as viruses, but
once you're "infected", the effects are just as dangerous, and
you can spread the trojan to
others without even being aware of it!
2. How did I get infected?
Trojans are typically files with
suffices like "ini", "exe", or "com", such as "dmsetup.exe".
These days nearly all trojans
are spread in the guise of a free game or other software. You
probably downloaded one from
a WWW or FTP archive, ICQ file exchange, or through
IRC's DCC file transfer (by
manual /dcc get or, worst yet, an "auto DCC get" feature which allows
anybody to send you anything,
including not only trojans but also viruses, child porn, etc.).
Typically the trojan needs to
be runmanually, and installs hacked files all over your disk silently.
