I think my research might be helpful for you if want want to see common behavior, characteristics of malware (self-terminated, perform multiple tasks in short time...)

Conference Paper MalViz: An Interactive Visualization Tool for Tracing Malware

New type of virus is interesting: polymorphic virus

Method A study of polymorphic virus detection

Most of the malware are in executable form but there is a new trend of malware which are not even executable forms. they work in sleeping mode. e.g 'mal-form' a media file? That is, is it something someone can do easily for a lot of files

Very interesting answers,

As per my knowledge; Virus, Warms, Trojans, Adware / Spyware (drive-by-downloads) sometimes, ransomware, PUA, Polymorphic or those which are working on sleeping mode as what you've add... at the end there will be certain executables that should run to trigger by that certain processes to do the subversions.

So, rather than .exe, .bat, or .ps ,

what else could be used to create the attack or the harm, and what about the others that are not using such that kind of executables , like those annoying adware that popup some adds or redirect your home page to another one (like at the time of downloading that adware it may only modify some files to be able to do that ) ? dont you think that still to do these modification it should run a commands( thus processes) that will allow it to do so ?

At the end, at the back of each malware: a process that will be activated by somehow to do the needful.

So, in general, what are the processors' activators (ofcoure beside the already mentioned ones , i.e. in BOLD)??