History of Trojan horse virus
Fun and games
A program called ANIMAL, released in 1975, is generally considered the world’s first example of a Trojan attack. It presented itself as a simple game along the lines of twenty questions. However, behind the scenes, the game copied itself onto shared directories where other users could find it. From there, the game could spread across entire computer networks. For the most part, it was a harmless prank.
By December 1989, Trojan attacks weren’t for pranks anymore. Several thousand floppy disks containing the AIDS Trojan, the first known ransomware, were mailed to subscribers of PC Business World magazine and a World Health Organization AIDS conference mailing list. This DOS Trojan would lay dormant for 90 boot cycles, encrypt all filenames on the system, then display a notice asking the user to send $189 to a post office box in Panama in order to receive a decryption program.
In the 1990s, another infamous Trojan appeared disguised in the form of a simple Whack-A-Mole game. The program hid a version of NetBus, a program that allows one to remotely control a Microsoft Windows computer system over a network. With remote access, the attacker could do any number of things to a computer, even open its CD tray.
Fun and games
A program called ANIMAL, released in 1975, is generally considered the world’s first example of a Trojan attack. It presented itself as a simple game along the lines of twenty questions. However, behind the scenes, the game copied itself onto shared directories where other users could find it. From there, the game could spread across entire computer networks. For the most part, it was a harmless prank.
By December 1989, Trojan attacks weren’t for pranks anymore. Several thousand floppy disks containing the AIDS Trojan, the first known ransomware, were mailed to subscribers of PC Business World magazine and a World Health Organization AIDS conference mailing list. This DOS Trojan would lay dormant for 90 boot cycles, encrypt all filenames on the system, then display a notice asking the user to send $189 to a post office box in Panama in order to receive a decryption program.
In the 1990s, another infamous Trojan appeared disguised in the form of a simple Whack-A-Mole game. The program hid a version of NetBus, a program that allows one to remotely control a Microsoft Windows computer system over a network. With remote access, the attacker could do any number of things to a computer, even open its CD tray.