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Back Orifice

1998

The hacker collective known as the Cult of the Dead Cow released a program they called Back Orifice that allowed someone to take control of another computer running Windows 95 or 98. Technically speaking, it was a "remote system administration tool," and as such had legitimate uses. It was controversial because the portion of the program that ran on the target PC was easily hidden from the user. Worse, that part of the program could be distributed as a "Trojan horse," essentially disguised as something else like an e-mail attachment. The group created it as a way of making a point about the lack of security in Windows 98, and went on to repeat the feat in 1999 with Back Orifice 2000.

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