Slashdot Mirror
Blackworm Dud Highlights Virus Naming Mess
An anonymous reader writes "Washingtonpost.com is running a story that looks at the total mess that the anti-virus companies made in naming the latest overhyped virus threat. According to the article, 'Blackworm' or the 'Kama Sutra worm' was the first major test of a new U.S.-government funded initiative to introduce some sanity into the virus-naming business. From the article: 'For most of [the antivirus vendors], this is like Esperanto: You can speak it if you want to, but everyone else is going to carry on babbling in their own native tongue, so it doesn't really matter.'"
Assign every virus an ID number. Then, people could search a CENTRAL database by typing in the ID number
They did that. Its called the CME, or Common Malware Enumeration number. Blackworm was long ago numbered CME-24. The problem is the press does not generally include this number in their press releases and instead uses one of the many names different companies come up with. Also, most end-user anti-virus programs haven't bothered to include CME's in the user visible parts of their applications.
Esperanto is now a virus? I hope it catches on quicker than it was as a language. Otherwise, it'll take 50 years to get anywhere.
Isn't this exactly what VGrep was designed to sort out?