Viruses and worms are the most well known of the Malware family, and as the name implies, they “crawl” through your computer and infect it.

Originally, the term computer virus was used for a program, which infected other executable software, while a worm transmitted itself over a network to infect computers.

Viruses and worms are different in that a virus requires user intervention to spread, unlike a worm that spreads automatically.

Considering this, it’s easy to see how viruses (and not worms) are the nasty culprits that are transmitted by email or Microsoft Word documents, and they rely on the recipient to actually open the infected file, which in turn, infects the system.