Who’s Heard Of A Road Apple?
 | by Diego on May 26th, 2008 |
A trojan horse is one of those terms that makes us cringe. It is largely unknown as to what it does exactly, or where it comes from, but we know that such a thing on our computer, is probably not good. Trojan horses, like viruses, malware, spyware seem to fall under the “just let my antivirus deal with it” category.
If I may, for a brief minute, explain some background and go historical and technological, both at the same time: As the Greek legend goes, during the Trojan War, it has been said that the Greeks gave their foes, the Trojans, a big wooden horse as peace offering. But after the Trojans pulled the horse inside their city walls, Greek soldiers busted out of the horse’s belly and opened the city gates, allowing their fellow soldiers to pour in and capture Troy (Brad Pitt, apparently, somehow had something to do with all of this). A computer trojan horse, then, acts in a very similar way: by downloading an unknown program, an attacker can have access to the system by pretending something it is not, thus behaving like the famous horse of troy—allowing for an insider attack. Trojan horses can be delivered by opening a rouge email attachment for example, with a promise of something interesting or needed like a fake program upgrade; they are often delivered via email attachments or Internet software downloads and can cause significant damage to ones computer.
A more sophisticated form of delivering trojan horses, though, is the lesser-known “road apple.” A road apple is a real-world delivery mechanism of a trojan horse—a quite creative one, if I may. In a road apple (a nicer term for horse manure) attack, the attacker leaves an infected CD Rom or USB drive in a location easy to be found and with a label that would attract curiosity.
For example, an attacker might leave a USB drive in an elevator or bathroom of a large corporation with a label that reads “Executive Bonus Payments 2007″. The victim would then insert to the USB drive to their computer out of curiosity and alas, the trojan horse would be delivered.
I tried this technique here at MinuteFix (sans the trojan horse), to see if someone would fall. This is what my hidden camera discovered:
Read more about Road Apples from Wikipedia.
May 26th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Some will fall for it, others won’t. It’s a form of social engineering, after all the weakest link in computer security is you (the human being).