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

Smug Mode

[Tom7]

My feeling is that most of these are Microsoft-based worms because that is the most popular platform. (And perhaps the users are less concerned about computers than we are.) There have been plenty of exploitable holes in pine, for instance; it's just that not enough people use the same version of pine for a successful worm to be built around it.

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

Re:Smug Mode

[rknop]

just a quick not, Word & PowerPoint & Eceel docs can be read in other apps. You can live with out/

They are never read in perfectly, in my experience. Sometimes it fails altogheter. It's still a proprietary format, and the controller of that format keeps it a moving target. You may argue whether this is the intent, but the effect is to thwart and delay those who try to make other products compatable.

But while we're talking lost productivity costs: how much productivity has been lost by developers of other products (including open source ones such as KOffice and OpenOffice) by having to write import/export filters by reverse engineering Microsoft formats? How much further along would those products be if they only had to support an open, well-documented product?

The fact that these things all have to be Microsoft compatable to be viable merely proves my point. Those of us who choose not to use Microsoft OSes and apps can't simply ignore Microsoft, but have to dance to their tune. Even if some have learned the dance, I regret that it was necessary.

-Rob

A Different Question

[ewhac]

I'm inclined to believe that the figure of $10 billion is little more than a wild guess. But since we're spending time trying to put a price on lost time and data, I have a different question along the same general lines:

Disregarding viral infections, how much money does American business lose annually to Windows crashing?

Schwab

10 billion fooey.

[mindstrm]

I'm not going to say viruses don't cost money....

But I have little faith on the 'loss valuations' put forth like this.

If I have to disinfect all 50 computers in here over the course of a year, I'm not going to claim my company 'lost' any money, even though my time IS worth money. I would have been here, and been paid, regardless of the virus being here or not.

The same goes for cost valuations done because of website defacements 'cracking' etc.... they are rarely rooted in reality, but instead rooted in a numbers game to make it seem worse than it is.

vmyths.com

[Satai]

vymths.com typically has debunkings of numbers like this.

It's definitely recommended reading for any geek. The introductory section is here.

I don't buy these numbers. These exorbitant figures are created from generous estimates of downtime, repair costs, and so forth. In addition, they take into consideration elements only tangentially related; I think that anybody with their Michael Shermer hat on can tell that a more serious inquiry than this is required.

(But, then again, this would be good fodder for anti-Microsoft arguments. Now how ethically responsible would that be?)

Code Red - Use the Present Tense please...

[Phrogman]

All of these articles that I have been reading lately discuss Code Red and Code Red II in the past tense. Its still out there folks and its still attacking systems. I just ran a scan of my log file for one of my systems and the following IPs attempted to attack the webserver (which is running Linux/Apache and doing just fine):

216.175.70.25 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:04:16:29 PST

61.129.37.165 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:10:47:55 PST

216.254.153.209 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:13:58:40 PST

62.110.109.5 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:14:01:40 PST

216.75.67.200 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:14:25:52 PST

216.210.235.68 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:14:32:04 PST

216.254.2.43 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:19:13:21 PST

195.128.198.2 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:20:40:38 PST

200.204.61.28 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:21:09:45 PST

ip244.54.136.216.in-addr.arpa which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:22:30:24 PST

209.88.144.24 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:22:52:19 PST

209.88.144.24 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:22:53:36 PST

216.72.50.157 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:22:54:32 PST

61.175.90.219 which attacked at 01/Sep/2001:01:18:38 PST

24.176.223.88 which attacked at 01/Sep/2001:01:25:49 PST

216.224.75.34 which attacked at 01/Sep/2001:01:49:07 PST

212.38.187.178 which attacked at 01/Sep/2001:02:45:22 PST

Now the number of attacks goes down on the weekenend and up during the week, which suggests that most of these addresses (if not all of them) are simply DHCP desktop boxes run by morons who are too stupid to download and install a patch that has been widely mentioned in the news. But the fact remains that this worm is out there and active on a ton of systems and should *not* be spoken of in the past tense.

Just my 0.45 Cents Canadian...

All MS money belong to us,

[blang]

I won't be a judge of whether the $10 Billion is an accurate figure. Consider what wold happen if damages was awarded to MS victims? (excluding punitive damages):

Some Microsoft figures:
Annual Sales: $25 billion
Annual earnings before taxes: $11 billion
Profit: 7.7 Billion

This shows us that MS contributed approximately 0 dollars to the economy. That's what I call a well put together scam. If punitive damages were awarded, MS would soon be history, and Billy Boy would move from his mansion to some shelter.

While the lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged, MS is a tax on the computer illiterati.