Learn More About Viruses and Worms

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What is the difference between a computer virus and a computer worm? Viruses are computer programs that are designed to spread themselves from one file to …

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Symantec AntiVirus Research Center
Learn More About Viruses and Worms
What is the difference between a computer virus and a computer worm?
Viruses are computer programs that are designed to spread themselves from one file to another on a single
computer. A virus might rapidly infect every application file on an individual computer, or slowly infect
the documents on that computer, but it does not intentionally try to spread itself from that computer to other
computers. In most cases, that’s where humans come in. We send e-mail document attachments, trade
programs on diskettes, or copy files to file servers. When the next unsuspecting user receives the infected
file or disk, they spread the virus to their computer, and so on. Worms, on the other hand, are insidious
because they rely less (or not at all) upon human behavior in order to spread themselves from one computer
to others. The computer worm is a program that is designed to copy itself from one computer to
another over a network (e.g. by using e-mail). The worm spreads itself to many computers over a network,
and doesn’t wait for a human being to help. This means that computer…