How to combine Greek Mythology, modern technology and English writing skills in one blog post!

MasterKAF has been working on a great article as part of his Classics studies on Ancient Greece. We spent time researching the myth of the Trojan horse and being as he loves all things tech, it was not long before we were making comparisons with the modern-day variety. We decided to use a “Compare and Contrast” framework from Teachit English, a really good resource for literacy and creative writing lesson plans. Here is the final article.

The meaning of the Trojan Horse, then and now. Discuss.

The legend of the Trojan Horse, told in the Iliad, by the Greek poet Homer gives an account of the war between the Mycenaeans and Troy (in modern Turkey). Iliad technically means “Troy Story” in modern English, no need to thank us for that pun, thank this particular video from Overly Sarcastic Productions instead!  After 10 years of fighting, Agamemnon’s army finally defeated Troy by trickery. Greek soldiers hid inside a wooden horse, which was given as a gift by the “defeated Greeks” and towed into the city by the triumphant Trojans. At nightfall, the Greeks emerged to capture the city. Today a Trojan Horse is usually a digital construct designed to look normal and harmless, it’s often disguised as legitimate software so it can easily infiltrate computers, often private computers. Here are some further contrasts and comparisons between the ancient and the modern.

The horse was made of wood and contained soldiers. The horse would have been very large and everyone could see it plainly. Modern Trojan horses whereas, are not on a physical plain and are often designed to not be large and obvious and do not contain soldiers obviously!

There are at least nineteen different general types of modern Trojan malware, while there was only one Trojan horse in history. 

Users are typically tricked by some form of social engineering into loading and executing modern Trojans on to their computer systems. Similarly, the residents of Troy were tricked to letting the Trojan horse in but not directly interacting with it. If they had the plan would have failed. 

Trojan-Spy is another type of Trojan which can spy on your computer.  Yet, in the myth of the Trojan horse, the Greeks did not spy in any way, but it did let an army sneak passed the defences of Troy.

There was a Trojan-like programme called Zeus first identified in 2007, often used to steal banking information. By 2009 it had been used to compromise 74000 FTP accounts on websites like The Bank of America, NASA, Play.com, Oracle and Amazon. Whereas, in actual Greek mythology Zeus (called Jupiter by the Romans) was the king of the gods.

A type of Trojan called “Backdoor” gives malicious users total remote control over the computer allowing them to do anything they want. It can unite a group of computers into a botnet or zombie network.  This compares quite well with the original Trojan horse since it has a similar purpose. Although it would not literally result in the opening of a gate it would periodically disable the firewall to allow other malicious software in. 

More often than not, in modern times when referring to the term “Trojan Horse” (especially digitally) it does not compare with the ancient Greek mythos.