I Thought It Was An Innocent Download!
Author: Tim Tropical
It all started out as a fairly normal day, even though I was
getting ready to go on a great vacation. I was really excited
about the trip that was about to go on and had packed about a
week earlier so that I wasn't rushed around at the end. I was
just moving around the house doing some last-minute things when
I decided that it would probably be a good idea if I were to
back up my hard drive before I left. I really haven't been
paying as much attention to my backups as I should, so I went
online to download a program to help me to move all of my files
to my external hard drive. I downloaded the program and set it
to transfer all of the files from my C drive over to my
external. As soon as I finish transferring the files I turned my
computer off and left for vacation.
A week later I returned from vacation refreshed and ready to
get back to work. I turned on my computer and walked away to put
some things into the laundry. When I returned to my computer I
realized that it hadn't started up at all. No matter what I
tried I could not get Windows to load and that's when I realized
that the backup program I had downloaded contained a Trojan
horse virus.
I don't know how familiar you are with Trojan horse viruses,
but they are small programs that are loaded in with other
programs or pictures. They really don't do any harm when you
download them to your hard drive. Once you activate the program
that you downloaded, however, the Trojan horse virus becomes
active as well. In this particular case it immediately went and
erased some vital system files that prevented me from starting
Windows normally. But this isn't all that the Trojan horse
viruses can do to your computer.
A Trojan horse virus, once it becomes active on your computer,
can take many different forms. It can do tricky things to you
such as opening your CD tray or causing your cursor to
disappear. It can also open up a port on your computer and allow
other malicious programs to enter in. These other programs can
do everything from stealing passwords and personal information
to taking control of your computer and locking you out of it
entirely. In the case of my computer, it had corrupted files
enough that I was unable to start it at all. To me this was
devastating as I use my computer for work every day.
Although it took me quite a few days, I was able to
successfully restore my computer. I lost a lot of data in the
meantime as I needed to format the hard drive and reinstall
Windows and all of my programs. Fortunately for me, my computer
was in need of being formatted and cleaned anyway. I ended up
with a much smoother running machine in the process. The moral
of the story? Be cautious of any download and if you don't
completely trust the file then don't run it.
About The Author: For more information about the Trojan Horse
virus please visit http://www.trojanhorsefacts
