Trojans

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If you use a high speed connection, there are hundreds of "crackers" out lurking on the internet, looking to get a remote-access trojan horse or listener installed on your system, access it and find out what's on it. This isn't an exception anymore. Trojans and worms using trojan elements are the new viruses of the Internet. A trojan infection can allow total remote access to your computer by a third party.

Unlike virus and worms, trojans do not replicate themselves so to get infected you must, in one way or another, have downloaded the program onto your computer. This most commonly occurs when you download a program that pretends to be one thing while it is actually another. Hence the origin of the "Trojan" name.

Many people believe they are protected from trojans by their anti-virus scanners. Unfortunately most virus scanners have only limited trojan detection capabilities. If you want serious protection you should install a specialized anti-trojan program in addition to your anti-virus scanner. The latest, most prevalent trojan horse programs are coded so they will disable your antivirus and disable or go right around your software firewall. Even newer, far more difficult to detect technologies with new uses for process injectors and rootkits are just beginning to appear and come into use.

Should your antivirus manage to catch a trojan, as often as not, it'll be unable to properly clean it from your system, which in some cases can cause the trojan to replicate itself and simply run again, waiting for its outside connection. So in order to provide maximum protection on your client's desktop, run both engines together.

Some of the better anti-trojan applications:

TDS-3 by DiamondCS
http://tds.diamondcs.com.au

Trojan Hunter by Mischel Internet Security
http://www.misec.net/trojanhunter36.jsp

BoClean by Privacy Software Corporation
http://www.nsclean.com/boclean.html

Pest Patrol by PestPatrol, Inc
http://www.pestpatrol.com

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