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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.'"
They should have just had everyone call it the Sex for Gymnasts virus.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
Hej! Mi povas paroli esperanto, you insensitive clod!
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Really, I think this would simplify things a bit. Assign every virus an ID number. Then, people could search a CENTRAL database by typing in the ID number that their anti-virus software reports, and be able get whatever info they need about the virus. The current naming conventions are very confusing for some people.
My sig is permanently on strike.
Assigning viruses numbers is an interesting idea, making tracking viruses easier in some ways, but much harder in others. For example, one couldn't say on the Nightly News: "Virus #34932423 has recently stricken the Internet, destroying the International Llama Foundation's forums and redirecting all Google search results to the federal government. Watch out, folks, #34932423 is a real nasty!" If the authorities do not name viruses, they will be given names by the common people to make communication easier. Much better to have an organization give each virus a name that has some chance of making sense, rather than having the masses choose a name that may or may make any sense, i.e. "the blue screen of death virus has hit again!"
games journalism blog
Virus names need to be more insulting to the creators. Some little script kidde is not going to be very proud to have written the "NeverKissedAGirl" virus.
The problem is all the variants of a given malware. For most users, the signature of the payload is less meaningful than the subject line of the e-mail. A virus email that promises Kama Sutra pictures is "different" from one promising Miss Lebanon even if the underlying payload and behavior is identical.
Perhaps AV experts need to use cladistics with a standardized set of feature dimensions. A cladogram of the virus varients and some threshold distance in feature-space would help segment similar and dissimilar malware.
I actually don't hold out much hope for this because malware is an adaptive threat. Malware creators might (and do) easily take steps to obfuscate their warez -- creating spurious variants for the express purpose of confusing AV software, news reporting, and users. The more variants that appear, the harder it is to counter the threat.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel
To stay ontopic, here's the list of companies and the name they picked for this virusSo who was calling it "Kama Sutra" ?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!