WormThere are several meanings of worm in cyberspace. One is a self-sustaining computer life form whose main purpose is to reproduce itself as many times as possible. WORM is also an acronym for "write once read many", which refers to an optical disk that can be written only a single time but read over and over. The word "worm" is also used for a search engine, the World Wide Web Worm (WWWW).
The type of worm that travels between computers is sometimes classified with computer viruses. However, a worm differs from a computer virus because a virus has no life of its own and is able to live only in corrupted software, while a worm can survive in perfectly healthy software. It travels from computer to computer and electronically copies itself between machines. Worms have the potential to corrupt files at an imperceptible rate, and may be activated by a number of actions. They have the capacity to do such things as figuring out passwords to UNIX accounts, entering the accounts and causing security holes.
WORMs (optical disks) are similar to CD-ROMs. They have a very large storage capacity, so they're frequently used for data archiving.
The WWWW is an automatic indexing tool (a search engine) from the University of Colorado. It can search over 300,000 multimedia databases for information, and is able to locate information in either hypertext (text that's underlined in a Web Browser) or in URLs (uniform resource locator--the Web page "address").