Malware in theory has been around since 1949 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_computer_viruses_and_worms). In the 1970s, the first viruses to emerge had names such as Creeper, The Rabbit and ANIMAL. These were simple programs which would spread through a system causing both malicious and non-malicious outcomes.

1980 saw more variations of viruses, worms and trojans. Jump ahead to current day and we see over 30 different types of malware and unwanted software. These range from adware, backdoor, hacktool to TrojanDownloader and worm.

The popular malware lookup site https://www.virustotal.com lists what each vendor detects malware as but looking through the results can be difficult because most vendors use different naming conventions for the same malware.

Performing a search for the binary '7ab2ef2b67207c4b89494a144cd09e69' yields 29 detections of the 57 available antivirus companies. Only 8 of these results were identical.

In 1991 CARO (http://www.caro.org) set out to standardize malware naming. Currently, the only antivirus vendor to utilize this naming convention is Microsoft.

This standardization follows the following format:

Type: Platform/ Family .Variant !Information

This is a call to all Information Security persons to email your antivirus vendors and demand they adopt this much needed standardization.