Virus Cost Estimate For 2001 Tops $10 Billion

Snootch writes: "CNN has a story on the costs of virii - they're absolutely collossal, and remember that the $10 billion figure is just *so far this year*...scary. The article gives a pretty good breakdown by virus, and while it says little else that the average /. reader won't know by now, it's an interesting read all the same. To quote Red Dwarf's Kryten, 'Smug Mode,' but I note that every single one mentioned in the article, bar one (Code Red), was a client-side Outlook virus ..."

"My other thought was this: Considering that according to the article, nearly half the money was spent cleaning infected systems out, then the virus-checker industry, and therefore the implications of Symantec's recent patent, are even bigger than I realised ... *gulp*" Of course, estimates like these are often made by people with vested interests in the effect such numbers have, and there are a lot of costs that are very tough to estimate accurately -- like sysadmin time.

Comments

Sircam was not an outlook specific virus

[plone]

Geez, you would think that on /. people would know that Sircam was not Outlook specific. I had a friend (who is rather computer illiterate) who doesn't even use outlook and stilll managed to spread the virus. Sircam doesnt just use the outlook address book for viruses, it looks through your temporary internet files for anything it seems like an email address (this is the reason why Tacoboy would whine like a sissyboy about the gigs of email he was gettign from sircam). Sircam require outlook to propogate, it had its own internal SMTp engine. Sircam was not outlook specific, merely windows specific. And i am sure that it would be really easy to make a port to linux (but i could be mistaken since i know jackshit about programming or unix). The true innovation of the sircam virus was its social engineering aspect. People are always curious to open documents, even if they know that it wasnt meant to be sent to them.

SirCam?

[hearingaid]

every single one mentioned in the article, bar one (Code Red), was a client-side Outlook virus

Hello? SirCam? It's an executable. It's mentioned in the article. It's a Windows executable, but it will happily infect people running Eudora on Windows, supposing of course that they are dumb.

It is another victory for the guys at Redmond, of course.