Family
Group of malicious programs sharing similar coding and behaviour
A family of malware is a group of unique items with minor differences but broad similarities - usually slight variations on the same source piece of code displaying much the same behaviours.
Members of the same family are usually given the same name by security products, with unique variants differentiated by a code appended to the name. Small changes in the behaviour from one variant to another may result in considerable changes in classification - for example, in some families some variants infect files, making them viruses, while others only spread copies of themselves, like worms, and still others show a mix of both types of spreading or no spreading at all. Thus members of the same family name can fall into different major categories.
