A Trojan is not in fact a virus, but a program that installs on your PC and may or may not be malicious. With most of these Trojans, we can slow their progress, but not stop them. Most often, we have to reload (re-image) the machine. There are a few things that you the user can do to prevent this from happening. The Trojans are installed when the users are surfing the net and click on various things such as:

• Screen Savers
• Shopper.com
• Live Anti Spy
• Limewire
• Any boxes that popup during internet surfing that give a warning about being infected
• Any warnings about someone watching you
• Email backgrounds or icons (this includes those smiley faces)

Some examples of damage are:

• Erasing or overwriting data on a computer
• Corrupting files in a subtle way
• Upload and download files
• Allowing remote access to the victim's computer
• Spreading other malware, such as viruses
• Spying on the user of a computer and covertly reporting data like browsing habits to other people
• Making screenshots
• Logging keystrokes to steal information such as passwords and credit card numbers
• Phishing for bank or other account details, which can be used for criminal activities
• Harvesting e-mail addresses and using them for spam
• Restarting the computer whenever the infected program is started
• Deactivating or interfering with anti-virus and firewall programs
• Randomly shutting off the computer

As you can see, these Trojans are very destructive to the operating system on the PC. To prevent this from happening to you, take a few precautions:

• Do not load any programs on your PC from the internet.
• Do not load screen savers on your PC, this includes ones purchased from a store, they look great but slow down your PC considerably.
• If you get a warning about being infected when surfing the net, do not click on the open window, hold down the alt key and press F4, this will close out the selected screen.
• Sometimes the wording is purposely designed to confuse a user....for example, click No to install
• Do not load emotion icons.
• Do not load Limewire or other freeware programs.
• Do not load weatherbug or other weather related software.
• When in doubt always do a restart/shutdown and avoid repeating last attempted actions (installing freeware, suspicious web browsing, etc).

Most of the time the sole purpose of a Trojan is to sell you something to remove the Trojan.

If you have any questions in reference to prevention or removal of a Trojan, please contact the JCSU helpdesk.

More:

25 million malware released in 2009 read below

http://www.scmagazineus.com/panda-finds-2009-a-record-breaking-malware-year/article/160687/

 

Posted By: John Norris, Director of Information Technology