Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Friday 1/4/2005

Midway through writing a piece about antivirus software, I realise what’s been bothering me. I don’t know what to call the stuff. It was easy enough in the beginning, when the only threats to PCs were a handful of viruses, but these days we’ve got spam, spyware, Trojans, root kits, adware and heaven knows what else alongside the viruses. Some software combines elements of antivirus, spam filtering, firewalling and anti-spyware, others focus on one area in particular, but they’re all doing the same job. Calling all such software 'antivirus' is just plain wrong, but there’s no good noun for this class of unwanted and potentially damaging code .

Crimeware is too aggressively cyberpunk and rather prejudicial — and besides, it makes me think of Josiah Wedgwood’s creamware ceramics. Then there’s threatware, which has utterly failed to engage anyone (54 hits on Google) despite being quite euphonious. Malware sounds right and is a reasonable portmanteau word, but despite more than two million hits on Google it still hasn’t caught on in general use. And it still doesn’t really cover spam, which lives halfway between actively malicious payloads and the weightless radiation of DDOS attacks — surely anything with 'ware' in it has to have some association with running a program.

Naw, we'll have to lose that association. Malware it is. Thus, software that deals with it is anti-malware, and we’ll just have to accept that stuff like firewalls will be a bit traditional network security and a bit anti-malware.

And now up to Scotland, where a riotous Saturday wedding party is promised with — I have no doubt — a definite case of malhead on the Sunday.