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Malware is the name associated MALicious softWARE. This is any program that performs functions that are detrimental to your computer or information or to the computers or information of others.
Types of malware include:
These names overlap somewhat. The following definitions are taken from en.wikipedia.org, with some modification.
A computer virus is a self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents. A computer virus behaves in a way similar to a biological virus, which spreads by inserting itself into living cells. Extending the analogy, the insertion of a virus into the program is termed as an "infection", and the infected file, or executable code that is not part of a file, is called a "host". Viruses are one of the several types of malicious software or malware. In common parlance, the term virus is often extended to refer to worms, trojan horses and other sorts of malware; viruses in the narrow sense of the word are less common than they used to be, compared to other forms of malware.
A worm is a piece of software that uses computer networks and security flaws to create copies of itself. A copy of the worm will scan the network for any other machine that has a specific security flaw. It replicates itself to the new machine using the security flaw, and then begins scanning and replicating anew.
A Trojan horse is just a computer program. The program pretends to do one thing (like claim to be a picture) but actually does damage when one starts it (it can completely erase one's files). Trojan horses cannot replicate automatically. Trojan horses are often used to create back doors into a computer for future use by nefarious agents.
An e-mail virus will use an e-mail message as a mode of transport, and usually will copy itself by automatically mailing itself to hundreds of people in the victim's address book.
Spyware is a type of program that watches what users do with their computer and then sends that information over the internet. Spyware can collect many different types of information about a user. More benign programs can attempt to track what types of websites a user visits and send this information to an advertisement agency. More malicious versions can try to record what a user types to try to intercept passwords or credit card numbers. Yet other versions simply launch popup advertisements.
A special category of spyware is a Keystroke Logger. Keystroke logging (often called keylogging) captures the user's keystrokes. Software keyloggers can be installed by a Trojan horse. Commercial keyloggers are available for use in user surveillance.