Anti-Virus Vendors Take Measures to Counter Trojan

By CIOReview | Thursday, February 22, 2018

Trojan is one of the earliest forms of cyber threats dating back to the late 90s. It encompasses multiple aspects ranging from hijacking to spyware. In a broader sense, it is a mechanism to perform delivery of information to the hacker deploying it. It can enter a system by any means—from a download or a website with an exploit. Attacks involving Trojans have been growing over the years, and 2017 saw a near hundred percent increase in cyber attacks targeted towards banking and financial institutions.

One of the key roles of the Trojans is to extract user information for cloud services. This could be an easy attack if a dual-factor authentication does not protect the transaction. The credentials that are stolen can be sold for large sums of money. Largely underestimated, the presence of a robust anti-virus protection and a two-factor authentication can prove largely beneficial to prevent loss of credentials through Trojans.

One of the most widespread confusion among users is about the identification of authentic software or even anti-virus that can be duplicated to façade as a genuine one. One point that brings relief to users is that most traditional security vendors use validation signatures as a mechanism to detect authenticity. Although this may not be highly effective, anti-virus vendors use machine learning to analyze data collated over the years to identify and mitigate virus/malware. In present-day technology, there has been a proven ability to detect malware on zero day.