I was traveling one time, as I often do, and was staying at a hotel on my trip home. I went down that morning in order to be able to grab some of the continental breakfast that they were serving. This particular hotel had a great breakfast buffet and I was really enjoying it when I looked over into the corner and there was a computer sitting in a small office. I asked one of the hostesses about the computer and they told me that it was for the visitors to the hotel to be able to check e-mail or to surf the Internet. I went back into the room in order to do just that. After checking my e-mail and making sure that my little Internet world was still running I stood up to leave when something caught my eye.



Sitting right there on the desk and partially hidden under the computer was a CD-ROM. I pulled out the CD to see what it could be and written on the outside were the words customer invoices and payroll. Now I'm not a dishonest person, but I have to admit that my curiosity got the best of me. I rationalized it in my mind that I would just take the CD home and look at it to find out who it belonged to. In that way I could return it to its rightful owner. I tucked the CD into my suit pocket and walked out.

Once I got home I loaded the CD into my computer and ran the file that was located on it. I was disappointed that the file didn't open, so I took the CD out of the tray and threw it away. What I didn't realize is that I had just fallen for a trick that is known as a road apple. The CD that was left in the small office was actually a ruse, and by running the CD program I ended up installing a Trojan horse virus onto my computer.

I had always thought that if I had a Trojan horse virus would crash my computer altogether. What I didn't realize is that this particular Trojan horse virus just ran in the background and secretly watched everything that I did. They recorded all of my keystrokes and did some screen captures and then sent them all to the creator of the Trojan horse virus. It wasn't long before trouble really began to crop up.

The first thing that I noticed that was wrong is that strange charges began to appear on my credit card. It seems that when I had typed it in to my computer when I purchased something online that the Trojan horse virus had sent off my credit card number and it was used by someone else. Then I was locked out of my e-mail account and found out that it had been compromised and used to send out millions of spam e-mails. Most of my accounts soon became unavailable.

It took me a long time to be able to correct all of the things that this Trojan horse virus had done. Not only did it steal my credit card numbers but it took all of my passwords and locked me out of my accounts. It took many e-mails and a lot more hours to be able to get all of my passwords changed and my credit cards reestablished with a different number. So it doesn't matter what kind of package it comes in, a Trojan horse virus can strike and cause you a lot of pain.