Anti-virus industry:white knight or black hat?

One has to wonder whether the anti-virus industry sleeps well at night. On one hand, it purports to serve the world by defending our computers and networks from any number of electronic critters and malicious code. On the other hand, sometimes its "cure" is worse than the problem its products allegedly treat. Add to that the decades-old concerns over business, market share and publicity, and you have all the ingredients for industry, product and service confusion. This situation regularly benefits the anti-virus software industry at the expense of its customers.

Let's start with malicious code outbreaks in general. Unlike hurricanes and tsunamis, there is no standard way of naming malicious code. Gone are the days when simple names like "Jerusalem", "Michaelangelo" and "Stoned" were accepted and used by all anti-virus vendors. So, we might have the same threat labelled "Worm_Minmail.R", "W32.Novarg", "MyDoom.A@m" or "W32/MyDoom" by competing companies. What we need is a return to industry-wide nomenclature for malicious code; used by all vendors and facilitating the reporting, analysis, and resolution of such outbreaks.

Read Full Story