We must be the laughing stock of the professional world, what with each virus having multiple ridiculous names. Heck, we have porn queens, soda pop, dogs (where we can't even get the spelling right), and a hodgepodge of everything else.

Why can't we develop a system like any other group that deals with recurring phenomena? The scientific community already has its Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, whatever system. Meteorologists use predetermined people's names for hurricanes. chemists have naming systems. Everyone has a naming system except security folks. And everyone abides by them.

So here is my top ten list of systems to use in order to name these viruses:

1. Reading primer three-letter words. Nobody would write viruses any more if they knew theirs was going to be called 'cat.'

2. The discoverer's middle name plus the street name where he or she grew up. For those folks that thought 'Melissa' was pretty cool.

3. Real viruses. Duh.

4. The date of discovery in hexadecimal form. For the geek in you.

5. The same system most people use for their passwords. At least they would be easy to remember (or guess).

6. The source IP for the first known instance. Hey, even if it is spoofed, it would be interesting.

7. Ben & Jerry's flavor names.

8. Street names in Seattle. All roads lead to... oh, forget it.

9. The Fortune 500. Maybe a lawsuit or two would shake things up for real.

10. Give me one of yours...

At the very least, we should have limits, like they have to be palindromes, or they have to write a sentence that has the name as a mnemonic. Maybe we should have charity auctions where people can pay to name the virus. Money opportunity: we could sell viruses the way they sell stars.

Well, all I know is that this current free-for-all is pretty ridiculous.

This article expresses concern about the use of honeypots in the enterprise. I used to be in the same boat, and still basically believe that traditional honeypots can be time-consuming. But expanding on the capabilities slightly can lead to some interesting possibilities.

Honeyresponders (HR) respond to all scans with bogus information. As soon as a source zeroes on on the HR, it blocks the ip. The premise is that there is no reason for anyone to be accessing services on the HR (because by definition there are no functional ones) and so every source headed in that direction must have malice in mind.

Honeytokens deserve a lot more attention. Most often, they take the form of bogus data inserted into legitimate datastores. Anybody accessing the data should be reviewed to understand why. The hard part here is just keeping track of the records. This type of solution would be valuable for "insider threat" monitoring.

By the way, I think all security researchers and ISPs should be deploying honeypots to really ascertain what is going on on the 'Net.

This article illustrates a problem that is so symptomatic of our space, I want to scream. So, folks, what are we doing wrong? Somehow, this CEO thinks that installing encryption and fraud detection software after an incident is somehow adequate.

"'We are making certain what limited information is on [the laptops] is encrypted. We don't think there's any sensitive information on them. But we're acting in an abundance of caution with respect to those laptops,' BankRI President and CEO Merrill Sherman said."

How ludicrous is that? How come we never hear all of the other banks say "Since Bank of RI got their information stolen, we realize that it could just as likely happen to us, and so we are installing encryption and fraud detection software before we get hit."?

On November 5th, Microsoft and federal law enforcement agencies announced the creation of a $5 million dollar fund to reward the bearers of information leading to the arrest of virus and worm writers. The first use of this fund will be a bounty of $250,000 each to identify and catch the writers of MS Blaster and Sobig (the “worms of summer”), for a total of $500,000.

This announcement promises to change the playing field of Internet hacking, strengthening the position of law enforcement and weeding out script kiddies and others who balk at the increased risk involved with writing viruses and worms, an activity that has no individual payback anyway.