The human mind loves to categorize things, and malware is no exception. We here at CSO have done our part: our malware explainer breaks down malware based on how it spreads (self-propagating worms, viruses piggybacking on other code, or sneakily disguised Trojans) as well as by what it does to infected machines (rootkits, adware, ransomware, cryptojacking, and malvertising, oh my).
You can find a lot of this type of technical taxonomy, and there’s certainly utility to it. In particular, it can be helpful to differentiate different types of malware infection vectors rather than lumping everything together as a “virus,” despite popular usage of the term. But we can also put too much emphasis on these sorts of divisions.
