Advice Request Where do all these names come from?

[Daniel Keller]

Hi everybody,

we all know the names, like "Heartbleed", "Spectre", "WannaCry", "Meltdown" and so on. Most of them even have nice logos.
I wonder where all these names (and logos) come from. Who decide that?

 

[Arequire]

Heartbleed

The bug was named by an engineer at Codenomicon, a Finnish cybersecurity company that also created the bleeding heart logo.

Spectre

The thinking behind the name Spectre was also multilayered. According to Paul Kocher, who worked with five other researchers to discover the bug, the idea of a ghost was very much on his mind.

"I picked the name Spectre for two reasons — the word's similarity with 'speculative' (since the vulnerability results from speculative execution) and its literal definition as a ghost," he explained over email. "Speculative execution is largely invisible from ordinary program execution."

Meltdown

According to Michael Schwarz, who was on one of the teams that first discovered and reported Meltdown, the name was coined by his colleague Daniel Gruss.

"One morning, he came into the office and suggested to [Moritz Lipp] and me that we should call it Meltdown,"

WannaCry

Ransomware that has been publicly named “WannaCry,” “WCry” or “WanaCrypt0r” (based on strings in the binary and encrypted files)

Usually the security researcher(s) that discover the vulnerability/malware name it themselves, although sometimes malware authors name their own malware.