Separating Trojan horses, viruses, and worms - a proposed taxonomy of software weapons

The terms used today to categorise different types of software weapons are not really suitable, because there exist several different definitions of each term, many of them contradicting each other. Therefore we present some methods for solving the problem. All the methods are based on a technical description´s model of IT weapons (TEBIT), which is a proposed taxonomy of software weapons. Two methods, a weapon-based and a definition-based, are evaluated empirically and the results and experiences are discussed, leading to the recommendation of the weapon-based method.