Trojan Spyware?

flyriceflyrice
edited November 2005 in Science & Tech
Is there such a thing as trojan spyware? I'm asking because a guy in our "Value Added Services" dept that takes care of a proprietary security suite program tells me that trojan viruses are really trojan spywares that will mess up a customer's computer. Then he tells me today that spyware is preventing a customer from downloading the security suite for another customer.

I'm certain he's full of s#$! and is using the spyware excuse to not do his job in helping customers, but is any of his comments true? I'm sure he just tells people "It's spyware, we can't support that, have a good day" and it makes me mad that these people he pisses off by not fixing them calls back and complains to me about their problems because ONE guy decided that being paid to sit on his ass and look "fly" and be a "dawg" and "be a thug" is more important than actually doing his job. I think politics is the only reason he's still here.

Comments

  • DexterDexter Vancouver, BC Canada
    edited November 2005
    Best definitions of viruses, worms and trojans is here:

    http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/security_risks/virus_worm_trojan_horse.html
    A virus is a program or code that replicates itself onto other files with which it comes in contact; that is, a virus can infect another program, boot sector, partition sector, or a document that supports macros, by inserting itself or attaching itself to that medium. Most viruses only replicate, though many can do damage to a computer system or a user's data as well.

    A worm is a program that makes and facilitates the distribution of copies of itself; for example, from one disk drive to another, or by copying itself using email or another transport mechanism. The worm may do damage and compromise the security of the computer. It may arrive via exploitation of a system vulnerability or by clicking on an infected e-mail.

    A Trojan Horse portrays itself as something other than what it is at the point of execution. While it may advertise its activity after launching, this information is not apparent to the user beforehand. A Trojan Horse neither replicates nor copies itself, but causes damage or compromises the security of the computer. A Trojan Horse must be sent by someone or carried by another program and may arrive in the form of a joke program or software of some sort. The malicious functionality of a Trojan Horse may be anything undesirable for a computer user, including data destruction or compromising a system by providing a means for another computer to gain access, thus bypassing normal access controls.

    Now this is where it gets tricky. Note the lasy sentence of the Trojan para. a Trojan can do anything from open up access to your computer to outside users, or mine it for credit card and bank info, or perform keylogging to get passwords, or whatever it is programmed to do. Spyware often comes in the form of a trojan. You think you are just getting some cute smiley faces for yoru e-mail, or a really cool weather update program, or a download accelerator, etc, but you also get something that monitors your net activity, opens ports for ads to be pushed to you, etc.

    So the point is you have to look at the words "virus", "worm" and "trojan" as labels for the DELIVERY METHOD for the crap to get on your system. Words like "spyware", "adware", "keylogger" and "data-miner" are descriptions of what the crap does once it gets on your computer.

    If the proprietary security suite is not designed to detect and remove spyware, then you are out of luck. You will need to look at 3rd party software like Spybot, Ad Aware, MS AntiSpyware, Ewido, etc.

    Dexter...
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