Before the Internet era, there were two famous characters from Greek mythology associated with Troy: Helen of Troy, the "face that launched a thousand ships," and the Trojan Horse, a hollow wooden statue of a horse that had Spartan soldiers hidden inside, waiting to attack once the horse was brought inside the walls of Troy. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War or the works of Homer for more details. Note that this Troy should not be confused with CA DB2 Tools Product Manager Troy Coleman, noted blogger and author.)

Today, I'd venture to guess that many more people have heard of Trojan Horses than of Helen, though I also suspect that a significant number of them don't know the origin of the term. Because, of course, as used today, Trojan Horse has come to mean a very specific type of malicious software, or malware - namely, software that appears to offer some benefit, but actually does harm once given the opportunity. (I'll let others philosophize about whether any distributed operating systems would fit this definition.)

None of which changes the fact that people continue to be taken in by Trojan Horses, and Trojan Horses continue to be taken in to people's computers and given the opportunity to do their worst.

Of course, the attitude, culture, practices, hardware and software that make the mainframe such a trusted and secure platform for business computing are also good ways to avoid such invasions.

The problem is, while the people who run mainframes are trusted expert technologists, anyone can, and does, run PCs, leading to all kinds of exposures.

So, it seems like a good way to complete this series of ten mainframe cartoons, with a reminder that scrupulousness always trumps naïveté as an approach to business computing.