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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.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.