You are at risk if...

Not everyone is at risk of unwillingly hosting a trojan on their system. Perhaps your computer has no connections to the outside world.

If you are connected to the internet, then your machine may pick-up trojans.

If you are connected to a network of other machines, your machine may be at risk from these same systems.

If your computer uses a CD player, a floppy drive, a ZIP drive or DVD player, then any of these may bring a trojan onto your system.

Ultimately, if your computer can connect in any way to the outside world, then you are at risk. The good news is that it can be very easy indeed to protect yourself.

How can I protect myself?

The fact is that while many of us can appreciate the threats that trojans may pose to our privacy and data, working out a solution is a different story altogether.

Fortunately, a good Anti-Trojan application will do all the work for you.

a² personal is designed to quickly, thoroughly and easily keep your PC free from trojan horses and malware. It does this by first of all scanning your computer’s hard drives. If it finds a trojan, it can be set to remove the offending file/s from your hard drive.

The second and most important part of a² is the background guard. It is able to block new infections with trojans or malware before they can become active. You can also define which programe may do things or not (e.g. open a port or write autorun-entries at the system).

Another important factor to consider is that new Trojans appear on a very regular basis. a² personal therefore includes free online updates. So your a² personal software will always be kept up to date, ensuring your continued protection.

How do I know if I already have a trojan horse in my system?

Unless you’re reasonably technical-minded, chances are that you won’t know if a trojan is in your system. The reason for this is simple. By the very nature of what they are, and what they are supposed to do, a trojan on your system will be designed to be as discrete as possible.

If attention is drawn to their existence, then trojans become as good as useless. So there will be no on-screen announcements, no visibly running programs or applications and nothing in the system tray.

One common method whereby people try to detect a trojan in their system is by using the windows task manager, to display all the running files or processes. Unless your level of technical knowledge is reasonable high, this may either be useless or even detrimental to the stability of your system.

Firstly, most users will be unable to distinguish between legitimate applications and trojans. On my own system at the time of writing this, I can see over 5 different “processes” with names such as act.exe, action.exe, BCResident.exe, IDMan.exe, wswatch.exe and more.

While some of these names may appear suspicious, the fact is that all of them are legitimate applications that should be running. By closing them down, I may simply stop a program from running, but I also run the risk of causing Windows to crash, and thereby risk losing data.

In short, this is not a good way to find the trojans. Additionally, you may have trojans on your system that aren’t even active when you check, so this process has far more failings than benefits.

The only way to be sure that there isn’t a trojan in your system, is by using software such as a² personal, which will, among other things, scan your hard drives for any trojan horses. If a trojan is found, the software can automatically delete it, leaving you with a clear, clean, trojan-free system.