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.