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

So we're talking either Microsoft or Microsoft?

[unitron]

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

Considering Code Red's favorite food, that's pretty much a clean sweep for Microsoft, isn't it?

I guess they do bring something to the total user experience that you can't get from anyone else.

Gotta run. A whole bunch of people hae sent me files they need my advice on.

Re:Smug Mode

[rknop]

I think perhaps this is an argument for diversity more than it is an argument against Microsoft.

From my point of view, an argument for diversity is an argument against Microsoft. My beef with Microsoft is not I don't like their stuff-- it's that I can't choose to use something else and have the pleasure of completely ignoring them. People still send me attachments in Word format, or require that presentations be in PowerPoint format. Web extentions still work on Windows only. I can freely ignore the Mac in everything I do. Windows users can freely ignore Linux in everything they do. But nobody can completely ignore Microsoft, simply because it's so prevalent.

And, to the topic at hand, that includes viruses. I know of servers running sendmail on a Unix box that had to go out of their way to delete SirCam messages from users' mailboxes, because they were huge and filling up the space available. This happens because most of the E-mail sending world is using Microsoft products.

Although the vindictive part of me would love to see Microsoft wither and die, in reality that's not what I want. What I want is for them to no longer be a monopoly or a near-monopoly. I want file formats and communications protocols to be open standards, so that anybody can develop software (proprietary or not) that will let users communicate with other users, each using whatever the hell he wants. And, then, yes, I want it so that no single virus are security hole can so easily affect 90% of the internet all at once.

All of this diversity is at the moment squelched by Microsoft. An argument for diversity is the strongest, and most important, argument against Microsoft as it exists today. The cost of viruses is only the most obvious and urgent manifestation of this. There are more severe long-term costs of a monopoly on something so basic as computer infrastructure.

-Rob

Forgetting History...

[Carnage4Life]

It's rather interesting watching slashbots make smug comments about "Microsoft worms" and "Outlook viruses" when the two most damaging worms that have occured this year could have appeared on any platform.

Code Red
The Code Red worm is a typical worm that exploits a buffer overflow just like the Morris Internet Worm and the Ramen worm before it. Either of the aformentioned worms could have done what code red did once they had 0wn3d the boxen, they just happened not to.

Heck, I've toyed with writing a proof of concept *nix verison of Code Red using wu-ftp vulnerabilities, rpc.statd vulnerabilities, telnetd vulnerabilities, sendmail vulnerabilities and even BIND vulnerabilities. Of course, I haven't gone much further than deciding what exploits to use and glancing at some source since I'm busy with school at the moment and more importantly I don't want to go to jail.

Sircam
The Sircam worm spread either through social engineering or across unprotected network shares. Neither of these requires Outlook. It didn't grab addresses out of the address book and instead grabbed them from the user's web cache. Sircam also didn't use the client mailer to mail itself out but instead included it's own mail program.
Thus all Sircam needed to spread was clueless users. This only thing Microsoft-y about this worm is that it ran on Windows.

All the above said, it is truly sad that on almost all popular platforms we are stil dealing with a 30 year old security problem whose causes and solutions have been known from probably before a sizable number of the slashdot population was born.