All I hear people talking about when it comes to malware is trojan, trojan, trojan. I can’t think of any program that would be considered malware/virus without being a trojan, because as far as I’m aware, people don’t purposefully download malware unless it is to sandbox and test for what it does. So are there any programs that are legitimately not a trojan?
In: Technology
Yes. Any malware that exploits vulnerabilities in software from remote over the network without user interaction. E.g. there were some computer worms doing this like SQL-Slammer.
They have become rarer though, as IT security is better as it used to be and those high-profile vulnerabilities are not appearing as often and are quickly fixed.
Trojan is a delivery mechanism. There are multiple ways to get malware on a system.
Someone could physically be at your machine and install it.
There could be a known vulnerability in a piece of software that allows an attacker to install malware.
Worms. They exploit stuff like lack of/ vulnerabilities in firewalls to infect the system without any action on the users part.
The terms are very similar but not synonymous.
A Trojan horse is software specifically designed to trick users into installing it.
Malware has many of the same characteristics, but includes software that is just poorly written.
So all Trojan software is malware, but not all malware is a Trojan horse.
Yes, there are types of malware that aren’t trojans. A trojan is malicious software that tricks the victim into downloading it by pretending to be something else. A trojan does not self replicate or spread by itself; you have to download and run the software, but you do so under false pretenses.
A *worm* is another type of malware that spreads by itself, sending its own code to other computers. An example is the [Slammer worm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer) which nearly took down the internet in 2003. The Slammer worm did not actually do anything other than spread itself, but still caused chaos because of the very rapid rate at which it spread, causing many servers to go down from the sheer volume of traffic caused by the worm.
A *virus* is a piece of code that spreads itself by injecting malicious code into existing (legitmate) software. The malicious code will execute when the host application is run, and then attempt to infect other programs. The name is an analogy to a biological virus, which replicates by hijacking a host cell and cannot reproduce by itself. Although the term “virus” is commonly used as a catch-all term for malware these days, it originally meant specifically this – a trojan isn’t a *virus*, technically.
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