Chris Mosby at myITforum.com

As some of you might remember I wrote an impassioned plea to antivirus vendors several years ago about what I called at the time the "Virus Name Game". 

This was later followed up with a reply from several individuals in the security community and the US government. 

This eventually led to the formation of the Common Malware Enumeration initiative which goal was to:

was created to provide single, common identifiers to new virus threats and to the most prevalent virus threats in the wild to reduce public confusion during malware incidents. This community effort was not an attempt to replace the vendor names used for viruses and other forms of malware, but instead to facilitate a shared, neutral indexing capability for malware.

This was a bold effort, but it was a losing battle from the start.  At the time, global malware threats were coming out with such velocity it was practically impossible to know what it was you were fighting.  To that end, the CME ended up with 39 identifiers on their list, with links to the corresponding vendors description page. 

Today that effort is officially over, as I got this e-mail from the CME e-mail list:

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CME-Announce / October 2008

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To the CME Community:

Launched in 2004, Common Malware Enumeration (CME) was a community effort created to address the pandemic model of malware in which single, common CME Identifiers were assigned to high-profile malware threats in order to reduce public confusion during malware incidents.

The changed nature of the malware threat since late 2006 -- away from pandemic, widespread threats to more localized, targeted threats -- greatly reduced the need for common malware identifiers to mitigate user confusion in the general public. The CME Web site and CME List have therefore been moved to archive status and all CME-related efforts have transitioned into support to the "DHS/DoD Software Assurance Forum Malware Working Group" at https://buildsecurityin.us-cert.gov/swa/malact.html.

The goal of the DHS/DoD Software Assurance Forum Malware Working Group is to develop a consensus on software that behaves in potentially malicious ways to facilitate detection and enable users to make informed decisions when discovering the presence of this software on their systems. The working group will develop definitions of malicious code and create a standard language for describing and characterizing its attributes and behaviors. The working group will consider multiple dimensions, including legal, technical, educational, and economic. It will leverage previous related efforts, including the work of the Anti Spyware Coalition and CME. Anyone who would like to become involved with the Malware Working Group should send email to "swa-forum-malware-wg-list@lists.mitre.org".

We thank all who have contributed to the CME effort. Comments or concerns can be sent to cme@mitre.org. For information on how MITRE's other information assurance data standards continue to help make security more measurable, visit http://makingsecuritymeasurable.mitre.org.

CME Team

The MITRE Corporation

http://cme.mitre.org