At some point during school you probably learned about Odysseus’s brilliant plan to sneak soldiers into his enemy’s city in the guise of a magnificent statue of a horse-the famous Trojan horse, to be exact. It’s a great story, and the plan was such a great tactical maneuver that, unfortunately, hackers have adapted it to suit their malicious attacks against your computer.
A Trojan horse, in the computer world, is a seemingly harmless program that delivers an unwanted, unsafe program that can have dire consequences. Unlike a computer virus, though, it relies on the user to complete some sort of action that triggers the program. So, like Odysseus’s Trojan horse being pulled inside the city walls, you have to open or install the item to release the harmful program, like Odysseus’s soldiers swarming out of the statue.