10.4. Trojan Horses

A Trojan horse, as the name implies, is an application that hides a nasty surprise. This is a process or a function, specifically added by the Trojan horse's programmer, that performs an activity that the user is unaware of—and would probably not approve of. The visible application may or may not do anything that is actually useful. The hidden application is what makes the program a Trojan horse.

Because ILOVEYOU presented itself as a valid e-mail message (the virus code was actually stored in an attachment to the e-mail message), some consider it an example of a Trojan horse, even though an e-mail message isn't an application per se. Other hostile code examples blur the line, including an attack in which the MIME type of ...

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