let's play the name game

ok i'll preface this by saying this was sparked by a debate currently going on in alt.comp.virus.source.code...

if you don't know already, anti-virus companies generally do not call a virus by the name the virus' author gave it... they rename the virus... that renaming results in something you may have seen before - different companies issuing virus alerts for a particular virus with different names...

there are those that say it makes no sense to do this... they say it's stupid, it pisses off the virus writers and it creates confusion among end users...

however, there are some important points to realize:

1. not all viruses are named by their author, so these clearly require naming by the anti-virus vendor...


2. not all author supplied names are unique (for a variety of reasons) and so such viruses clearly need to be renamed to avoid confusing them with previous viruses that have the same author supplied name...


3. some author supplied names refer to people, places, companies or brands and the anti-virus companies really don't want to be issuing alerts for the george bush virus or the corn flakes virus - it puts them in a difficult legal position...


4. some author supplied names have political, religious, or obscene references in them, and that's also something anti-virus companies don't want to put into virus alerts for similar reasons...

so clearly some viruses have to be renamed... but do all of them have to be renamed?

it's been suggested that you could simply use your best judgment to tell if the author supplied name was suitable or not - maybe even use a search engine since obviously a person isn't going to see the significance of many references from far off lands... the thing is, a search engine isn't perfect in that regard either... more importantly, though, a search engine is bound to turn up some kind of reference (whether the virus author intended it or not) for all sorts of possible names so in practice the anti-virus researchers would probably find themselves renaming most viruses anyways... and should it really be the anti-virus company's job to go to the trouble of verifying the suitability of the name provided by the author? is that really the most productive use of their time and your money? i don't think so...

there is a valid complaint, however... sometimes the renaming process gets personal, the renamer chooses a name specifically to piss of the virus author (some have even bragged about doing this)... that is unprofessional and companies should not tolerate that kind of behaviour from their employees - they shouldn't be picking fights with virus writers, they should be doing their best to avoid contributing to any of the virus writers' possible motives for writing viruses...

there is another valid complaint... not all the companies seem to rename a given virus to the same new name, and this certainly does cause confusion... to a certain extent it's understandable - if 2 researches in different companies are trying to decide on a new name for a virus at about the same time (give or take a couple of days) then they're bound to decide on different names... hopefully those names get changed later to be more consistent, and i'd certainly like to see that happen as fast as possible (i'd like to see anti-virus companies making a visible effort to minimize the confusion associated with this sort of thing)... sometimes the names don't get changed at all, though, and for the end user that is simply not acceptable... if you find your anti-virus vendor doing that, vote with wallet, make your feelings heard where they'll feel it the most...