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ZIP compresses individual files. These may then be bundled together into an archive, but they are still individually compressed files. You can pick and choose to extract only one file from a ZIP archive if you want.
RAR takes all the files it is given and compresses them into one blob. This enables it to find similarities that occur in different files and use that to achieve far better overall compression given files that contain similar stuff (human readable documents for example). This also means that you cannot extract a single file from a RAR archive. You have to extract them all, then ignore the ones you don't want. As a side effect, this might make RAR's better for spreading malware, since you can't pick and choose what specific contents you want to decompress. Certain utilities may make it appear that you can choose which files to decompress in RAR, but they're not really doing that under the hood. They're decompessing them all (as they have to with RAR) and then throwing out the files you don't want on your behalf.
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