A worm the press calls Kama Sutra seems to have had little effect yesterday, but it's hard to say, because no anti-virus vendor uses that name. As an AP article has pointed out, "Friday's file-destroying worm goes by Mywife at Microsoft and McAfee, Blackmal at Symantec and Computer Associates. ... At F-Secure, it's version E of Nyxem, while Sophos says it's version D. Others variably refer to it as Kapser, KillAV, Grew or Blackworm. The official name? CME-24." (There's a longer list of names here.)
Anti-virus companies that are working independently and in a hurry will give a new virus a name that fits their own schema, but there's no reason why they couldn't associate their internal name with a number on a centralised database. And there already is such a system: CME, or Common Malware Enumeration.
CME-24 was assigned to "Kama Sutra" on January 24, and could therefore have been used in the vast majority of reports.
It would also have helped if anti-virus companies had started using its CME number as soon as possible. For example, F-Secure could have called the worm CME-24/Nyxem.E, Trend Micro could have called it CME-24/WORM_GREW.A, and so on.
We know there's a problem, and we know there's a solution. Why can't people just use it?
