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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • Trojan is any malware that pretends to be a legit program. It does not need to have backdoor or info stealing capability even though most malware (trojan or not) today does. For example, pre-Internet trojans might just invisibly install themselves along the actual program they were bundled with and then nuke the system on a certain date. Antivirus companies would even advance the date on their systems in hopes of detecting these and being the first to develop a patch.

    But since this program is not malicious, it just straight up hogs system resources and/or crashes it due to a mistake, it cannot be considered malware and therefore not a trojan.

    Certain Intel processors from around 2000 would crash everything when loading the 4 bytes F0 0F C7 C8 into a specific register. Would you consider this a backdoor because it allows any program to crash the system? I wouldn’t say so, crashing Windows 98 was probably not too hard anyway…