Which of the following is TRUE about the difference between a worm and a virus?

The programming language used to write malware is not a defining characteristic that distinguishes worms from viruses; both can be written in any language.

While some viruses target the boot record (called boot sector viruses), this describes a specific virus subtype, not a universal distinction between all viruses and all worms.

A worm is self-contained malware that exploits network vulnerabilities or system services to copy and spread itself to other machines without any user action. A virus, by contrast, must attach itself to a host file or program and depends on a user opening or executing that file to trigger replication. This distinction in propagation mechanism - autonomous versus human-assisted - is the defining technical difference between the two malware types.

Disabling antivirus update services or killing antivirus processes are behaviors that some specific malware variants exhibit, but they are not the defining difference between the worm and virus categories.