What is a Trojan Horse Virus? - Definition, Examples & Removal Options

Trojan Horse Virus Definition

The name of this virus comes from geek story of Trojan war. This program is designed to provide unauthorized access to users computer. Such virus doesn’t replicate themselves rather they lead to viruses being installed on a machine. Since that computer who is infected from such virus need to be controlled by Trojan creator. Trojan Horse virus is a program that appears to be something safe, but perform some of the task such giving access of your computer information to the others and your personal files send to other systems. This is very common method used by criminal to infect your computer and collect your personal information from you system.

Examples of Trojan Horse virus

• Some of the sites offer to download free programs and games. So to download the pirated version of a program or game allow you to illegal use of that program during the installation it may also install Trojan on you system.
• Downloading the screen saver from the popular screen saver websites may also lead to infect the file you system files and also install Trojan horse on you system.
• You receive email from any unknown person to open a specific file. So, to open that file infect you system from Trojan virus.

Characteristics of Trojan

This virus usually runs at the background, users of computer don’t even know that their computer infected by Trojan virus. When the system is infected additional malware is installed and sensitive data can be stolen. This can be used as to track the cyber criminal’s activities. Once the virus penetrates computer security defences, means giving control of the infected computer to the hacker.

Types of Trojans

Trojan horse virus is classified into many different types of composite classifications.

• Backdoor Trojan: these are created to give an unauthorized access to user to remote control of a computer and once it installed on your machine then remote user can do anything to infect your system.
• Exploit: Exploit Trojans are application that are seeking for secure software and OS that already installed on a computer for destructive.
• Rootkit: These are designed to hide further malware from being discovered. This program run for an extended period of time on the infected computer.
• Ramson: This virus will modify or block data on a computer. So the expected problems are either doesn’t work properly or so certain files can’t be accessed. Person paid for ramsom disrupting the computer will restore the computer or files.

Additional Trojan horse viruse are DDos, Banker, FakeAV, Downloader, Spy.

How to Avoid Trojan Horse virus

This virus is usually installed by the unaware users, So the easy way to avoid not to getting infected your system from Trojan virus is not to install software from the unknown sources that we discussed in above examples. If such virus infect any system then it is very difficult to remove, but still there are numbers of anti-virus or you can say anti-malware program available to avoid such damage to your system. So here we are going to tell you some of the popular free scanners they are: AVG, SpyBot, bitDefender, Malwarebytes, SUPERAntiSpyware, Sophos.