About 3,000 years ago Thursday, some Greeks left the people of Troy a wooden horse at the walled city’s front gate -- a free gift, no cost, no obligation from would-be invaders who wanted their adversaries to think they had left in peace.
Accepting the Trojan horse at face value turned out to be a big mistake.
Some things never change. In the 21st century Trojan horses are made of electronic "1s" and "0s" but are still left for you in all innocence and in plain sight: your e-mail inbox, in IMs and on a web page. But the intent, and the outcome, is pretty much the same: to pillage and steal.
The computer security industry describes computer Trojans as any program that purports to be one thing -- a screensaver or a .pdf file or a video codec -- but which actually conceals a malicious payload, like a password logger or pop-up advertising software.
One might be tempted to think we've gotten smarter in the three millennia since the Trojans ignored Cassandra's warning and accepted the first one. But when it comes to a propensity to fall for a deal that is too good to be true, humans have made little progress.
Or none whatsoever, if you believe computer-security guru Peter Neumann.
"People are still just as stupid now as they were then," says Neumann, the chief scientist at SRI's computer-security lab. "They see something shiny or a website that offers something for free and then they are dead."
But don’t expect technology to save you from yourself any time soon, Neumann warns.
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Human: You are the weakest link. Goodbye.
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