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At 10:50 AM 9/8/95, Pickett-Harner, Molly wrote:
>(Remember -- the [only significant] difference between a trojan horse and a
>virus is that the former invades & does whatever it's programmed to do
>whilst a virus does the same over & over.)
A Trojan Horse is introduced into a system under the guise of being a
utility, game, or what have you, and is executed by an unsuspecting user. A
Trojan Horse cannot replicate itself, execute itself, nor can it move to
other systems without human intervention. A Trojan Horse program sitting on
your hard disk is harmless until you execute it.
A virus attaches itself to an otherwise legit program, and can execute
itself, propagate itself to other programs, other systems, or cause system
damage, or both. Since I use a Mac, the only virus I'm familiar with is
WDEF, which infects the desktop file and is mostly harmless, but which will
infect the desktop files of every disk inserted. Luckily those Bulgarian
hackers only seem to have Wintel machines ;)
The end result is irrelevant. I'd say the program in question is a Trojan Horse.
