Cult Of The Dead Cow

The Cult of the Dead Cow is an organization of hackers with hats of an uncertain colour who have devised and thereafter distributed a lethal program known as Back Orifice. In a nutshell, Back Orifice works through a trojan installed on your computer. Once installed, this trojan will make its presence known and carry out commands for anyone running the Back Orifice program.

Control of your local machine becomes almost total. The remote Back Orifice program might ask the trojan to supply account IDs, your web caches (with cute stuff like credit card information), anything - and that's just what the program user might do if in search of a profit, financial gain. A lot of these pranksters just want to rape, maim, and mutilate of course (comes with the territory), so they might be trying neat stuff like screwing around with your installed programs or wiping out your entire disk. If they're really mad at you that is. Or maybe even if they aren't.

NetBus is a similar program. Again, it needs a trojan snuck on your machine, but after that it can take almost total control.

Pranksters using Back Orifice or NetBus have to accomplish two things to wreak their havoc:

1. They have to sneak the trojan onto your machine.
2. They have to find out if you have it, if it's running, and if they can now communicate with it.

Next: Getting The Horse Inside