For instance, when everyone was in a panic over the revelation of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities within x86 chips, a website that looked very much like the site for the official German government cybersecurity agency appeared and offered a Spectre/Meltdown patch for download the "patch" turned out to be a Trojan, dubbed " Smoke Loader." Most of us probably believe we're not naive enough to fall for this, but somewhat more sophisticated Trojan sites might emulate a more reputable organization to convince us that we're downloading something we're not. But how does a Trojan really work in practice? How do attackers trick you into downloading nefarious code? In a classic method, as Malwarebytes explains, websites might tempt users with a free game or screensaver that turns out to contain malware. So far we've been speaking in somewhat general terms. How does a Trojan horse infect a computer? People who do that are almost certainly talking about Trojans, not viruses. ![]() ![]() But be aware that many people use virus and malware interchangeably, and so it isn't uncommon to encounter the phrase Trojan virus in the wild. These distinctions are important if you want to stay strictly correct, and we'll aim to use all three names correctly here and elsewhere on CSO. (A worm is a third malware type: a program that doesn't need a host application to reproduce and spread.) By contrast, a virus, much like its biological counterpart, embeds itself into the code of a host program and then uses that host to spread itself and reproduce - no user intervention required. (See our guide to malware types) Like the Trojan horse, Trojan malware masquerades as something benign so you'll let it in, but contains a hostile cargo. ![]() Is a Trojan a virus? You'll often see the phrase " Trojan virus" used to identify this type of malware, but that's strictly speaking not correct: Trojan and virus are names for different types of malware that infect computers in different ways. As the saying goes, always beware Greeks - or strangers online - bearing gifts.
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