Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

Chapter 6. Trojan Horses

You might have read the last chapter on backdoors and thought to yourself, “I'd never run a program named Netcat or VNC on my machine, so I'm safe!” Unfortunately, it isn't that easy. Attackers with any modest level of skill will disguise the nasty backdoors we covered in the last chapter or hide them inside of other programs. That's the whole idea of a Trojan horse, which we define as follows:

A Trojan horse is a program that appears to have some useful or benign purpose, but really masks some hidden malicious functionality.

As you might expect, Trojan horses are called Trojans for short, and the verb referring to the act of planting a Trojan horse is to Trojanize or even simply to Trojan. If you recall your ancient ...