14 DAY TRIAL // US-CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) has decided that it is time for a unified scheme to dub viruses, which would eliminate any confusion among users.
So far, each anti-virus producer had the freedom to dub its viruses as they saw fit. For example, the latest Sober variant, which appeared on Wednesday, had names like Sober.q (Symantec), Sober.s (F-Secure) and Sober.o (Sophos).
The new project employs a common scheme, called Common Malware Enumeration, which will assign unique names for each virus. When a virus is discovered, the company sends a sample to an automatic system which generates a name. For example, the new Sober version is called CME-151.
A similar scheme already exists for vulnerabilities, Common Vulnerability and Exposure, in which names are composed from an identification number and the year of the discovery.
In this way, the companies will be able to talk about the same virus, while having the freedom of using their own code name as well. Companies like Symantec, McAfee, Kaspersky, Trend Micro, Sophos, Computer Associates, F-Secure and Microsoft have expressed their support for the unified classifying scheme.
Should the project be a success, US-CERT announced that it will extend the initiative to spyware.
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