And here I was, trying to use the most generic term in the hopes of not having to guess at if it was a virus, a trojan, scareware or something else that would've been distributed p2p back then
Nah, you're good. Malware is definitely the proper term now; it's just a little anachronistic, since most of the people I knew in the early 2000's would even have said that a Trojan was just a type of virus.
