Who's Spying On You?

Spyware or Virus?

Spyware is not a virus, although both are malicious, both capture or destroy information and both can ruin the performance of your computer.

Worms and viruses are self-replicating programs that travel from computer to computer by various means.  A virus seeks to infect a computer, replicate and infect as many computers as possible, as quickly as possible.  It usually relies on email for propagation, but tries other avenues of attack such as file sharing, telnet, FTP, Instant Messaging, or any services and programs on your computer that communicate with other computers.

A worm is a virus-like program that spreads automatically to other computers by distributing itself via email or other means. For example, an email-delivered virus (a worm) may search your computer's file system for your address book and send infected email messages to all of your contacts.

Both worms and viruses have, as their first objective, merely propagation.

Spyware is more interested in having the host remain healthy: a non-functional computer has neither advertising value nor revenue potential to spyware.  So whereas virus activities are overt and generally attract attention quickly, spyware activities are typically covert and their infection is often long lasting.

The difference is: Viruses attempt to spread. Spyware attempts to embed.