Computer viruses and Computer worms
The best-known types of malware, viruses and worms, are known for the manner in which they spread, rather than any other particular behavior. The term computer virus is used for a program that has infected some executable software and that causes that when run, spread the virus to other executables. Viruses may also contain a payload that performs other actions, often malicious. A worm, on the other hand, is a program that actively transmits itself over a network to infect other computers. It too may carry a payload.
These definitions lead to the observation that a virus requires user intervention to spread, whereas a worm spreads itself automatically. Using this distinction, infections transmitted by email or Microsoft Word documents, which rely on the recipient opening a file or email to infect the system, would be classified as viruses rather than worms.
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