Security news
Security news5 October 2005
Sophos joins drive to cure virus-naming confusion
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| Mark Harris, director of SophosLabs. |
Sophos, a world leader in protecting businesses against viruses, spyware and spam, has today announced that it has joined the editorial board for the Common Malware Enumeration (CME) initiative, an industry group whose aim is to provide unique, common identifiers to new malware threats.
In the past, computer users and system administrators around the world have faced difficulties identifying threats attacking their systems, as anti-virus vendors rely on different virus-naming conventions to refer to particular threats. The CME initiative aims to mitigate this confusion, by providing a common name for high profile threats that can then be used in vendor products or their websites.
As part of an alliance of global security vendors, Sophos will play a pivotal role in helping CME apply common identifiers to newly discovered malware threats. For every virus identified by CME, Sophos will display the CME reference in its extensive database of virus analyses here.
"Historically, regulating virus naming has proven difficult for security vendors, because of the need to issue threat protection as quickly as possible to customers," said Mark Harris, director of SophosLabs™, Sophos's network of virus and spam research centers. "We encourage more anti-virus vendors to participate in this initiative, which will benefit customers involved in securing their computers from malware attack without disrupting the serious work of rapid virus analysis and protection."
Through the CME initiative being sponsored by the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of US Department of Homeland Security that coordinates response to cyber attacks, computer users and security administrators across the globe will benefit.
"The participation of global security companies is critical to the success of this initiative," said Desiree Beck, Technical lead for the CME initiative. "Their expertise will help bring the CME concept to maturity and ensure that it meets the needs of the security community."
CME has already begun its work by applying identifiers to a series of known threats in the format of CME-N, where N is a series of numerical digits. More information on the CME initiative can be found here.
About Sophos
Sophos enables enterprises all over the world to secure and control their IT infrastructure. Sophos's network access control, endpoint, web and email solutions simplify security to provide integrated defenses against malware, spyware, intrusions, unwanted applications, spam, policy abuse, data leakage and compliance drift. With over 20 years of experience, Sophos protects over 100 million users in nearly 150 countries with its reliably engineered security solutions and services. Recognized for its high level of customer satisfaction and powerful yet easy-to-use solutions, Sophos has received many industry awards, as well as positive reviews and certifications.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com
