What is a Trojan horse program?
A type of program that is often confused with viruses is a ‘Trojan horse’ program. This is not a virus, but simply a program (often harmful) that pretends to be something else. For example, you might download what you think is a new game; but when you run it, it deletes files on your hard drive. Or the third time you start the game, the program E-mails your saved passwords to another person. Note: simply downloading a file to your computer won’t activate a virus or Trojan horse; you have to execute the code in the file to trigger it. This could mean running a program file, or opening a Word/Excel document in a program (such as Word or Excel) that can execute any macros in the document.
