I think the computer term for the thing that most resembles how a meatspace virus behaves and propagates is "worm". Most worms can probably be classified as viruses, but most viruses nowadays (thankfully) aren't worms. (It can also generally refer to anything that's malicious and recursively self-propagating, like Samy's infamous Myspace XSS worm [1].)
Meatspace viruses are like computer worms, though computer viruses and computer worms aren't like meatspace worms; for that and a laundry list of other reasons, "malware" has superseded a lot of those terms among the infosec community.
> I think the computer term for the thing that most resembles how a meatspace virus behaves and propagates is "worm".
A compuyter virus self propagates with human intervention. A worm self propagates without human intervention.
I think the biological item that most closely resembles a work would be a parasite that is self-mobile. E.g. a botfly.
Various computer virus' in the past propagated through floppy drives and infected floppies, but you were safe as long you didn't initiate the action that caused the infection (use the floppy in your computer). Also, you can get a virus by visiting a website, which is also initiated by the uninfected.
Worms used infected host resources to actively seek out and infect other hosts without any initiating action by those other hosts.
In this way, meatspace viruses are NOT like computer worms. They don't cause their hosts to seek out people to infect. Infection is either coincidental or requires some allowance by the candidate (close contact, use of shared resources, etc).
That's true. Biological viruses are kind of in between computer viruses and computer worms.
I still think a worm is a decent analogy, though. For example, the first thing a worm will often do is scan the local network and try to infect each "living host" it finds in its vicinity. In some sense it can be seen as having some kind of willpower or intention, but it's a little more like a blind, unthinking process of trying to constantly fire itself in all directions, not unlike how a virus is unthinkingly regularly emitting itself into the air around it to infect those in its vicinity.
