Why AV Vendors Don’t Name Malcode Consistently

The December malware threat reports are trickling in from vendors — and they all appear to be different. Fortinet, Sunbelt Software, and Kaspersky all published their lists of the most prevalent malware strains for the last month of 2009, but they didn’t match up, leading to an admission that users will inevitably be confused by the results. For example, in its malware report for last month, Fortinet said that W32/PackBredolab.C!tr topped the charts of malware variants detected in December, accounting for two-thirds of malware activity in December. It was a new entry to the malware table, the company said. Kaspersky highlighted three versions of the Kido worm, known more popularly as Conficker, in the top three slots of its own malware threat report for December. Sunbelt listed Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT in the top malware slot as part of its own report, with almost 20% of the activity for December. A quick scan of the other top 10 malware entries for each company reveals few if any matches