At 05:56 12/6/99 , Acer wrote:
>Why's it called a trojan?
Etymology: comes from the "Trojan horse" employed by ancient Greece to
defeat Troy. Not really the right term for most current "viruses"
including the "happy99" one. Even so, it is often used as a generic label
for any maliciously destructive code just as "virus" is.
One of the methods used to do destroy people's machines is embedding
destructive code in a popular program Years ago it was usually done to a
shareware or freeware DOS utility in high demand . . . something that would
guarantee heavy upload to and download from dial-up bulletin boards.
Typical was code that would reformat the hard drive or randomly delete
files. One of the more notorious a long time ago was a modified DOS PKZip.
The author of that Trojan Horse (a proper use of the term) iterated the
PKZip version number to play on users' desire for the latest version.
-- John
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