V is for Variants
Many viruses, trojans or worms belong to the same ‘family’ but have been tweaked a little to try and outfox security software and spread yet more infection of the same type. These altered versions of the same malware are called ‘variants’. Any one piece of malware may spawn hundreds or, in some cases, thousands of variants. The variants can develop extremely quickly and easily bypass your anti-virus even though the original virus would have been caught by it. This emphasises the need to keep your anti-virus regularly updated, at least weekly for occasional Internet users and daily for those who use the Internet more heavily.
As there is no scientific method for naming malware the same virus may have different names according to the anti-virus system you use but they all tend to use the same method for variants by placing an alphabetic suffix after the name. For example the first variant to the bagle virus was named bagle.a, the next bagle.b and so on. When the end of the alphabet is reached another letter is added so after bagle.z came bagle.aa and so on.
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