What's The Actual Cost of A Virus?

ThosLives writes "CNN Money just posted a story that says the MyDoom virus may cost businesses $250M. My favorite quote is that for small to medium businesses with 400 or less employees, the estimate is between $48,000 and $58,000 cost to 'secure themselves' from the particular virus. Does anyone know where that number comes from? If one can charge a year's salary to fix one virus, I'm in the wrong job! Any input out there on the real, hard costs of things such as virus protection?"

Comments

Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[DarkHelmet]

Let's see...

The cost of securing your mail server from viruses includes...

1. Download of Antivirus for sendmail
2. Installation of said program. (Which is about a day if you factor in moron-ness)
3. Keep new viruses in check.
4. The cost of 400 yellow post-it notes saying "DO NOT OPEN FILE IF EXE OR SCR!" (as a contingency plan.

The total cost of protecting a company from *all* viruses that go to their business accounts runs around $200 maximum.

Any moron who works at a company and opens said attachment should be fired anyway. So in the long run, the company actually *saves* money by all these worms going out.

So that must mean that SCO must be rewarding the MyDoom author for all the extra money they keep from firing morons at their company that open those attachments. Wait... that can't be right...

Re: Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[Black Parrot]

> So remember folks: all those years of school, training, reading, getting up at 5:30AM, working your ass off, overtime, weekends, holidays, sitting in meetings, telling your asshole boss how smart he is...

> ...all reverse vacuumed into the shitpipe because you made one mistake. There's no excuse for being human in an inhuman workplace. Take your parting gifts, pack up your shit and get the fuck out. Time to watch your career get destroyed.

You're talking to the CIO that moved the company to Microsoft products, right?

Re:Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[Urkki]

• So everyone should employ morons because its good for the economy?

No. It's everyones responsibility to get rid of the morons. For good.

Just think of those working around you, in the next cubicle or in the next room... Are they morons? Some morons are obivious, some hide their moronity well, so look carefully! Even your family members or friends could be morons... So stay vigilant at all times!

After you've identified a moron, it's your national duty to get rid of him... Some poison slipped into his/her coffee cup, rigging their keyboard with AC power, a little push at the train station... Whatever it takes, your country depends on you!

Re:Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Any moron who works at a company and opens said attachment should be fired anyway.

Just what I wanted to hear! Now how do I go about handing my CEO his pink slip..?

Re:Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[red_mug]

these rules applied, what's the actual cost of a virus story on /. ?

Re:Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[way2trivial]

Well, consider this.. if the reported average is accurate, you just ensured some other company paid 100k or more..

by taking care of your company cheaply, your forced some other company to have a MAJOR expense.. kind of you.

Re:Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[ynohoo]

After 15 years in the programming business, and 8 years mucking about on the internet, on Tuesday I caught my first virus.

Yes I'm usually careful, but I opened the attached zip file out of curiosity - I've never heard of an exploit of Winzip before.

Two minutes later we got instructions from our sysadmin to apply the new McAfee patch, which detected it. So rip out the network cable, then track down the latest version of Stinger from a co-workers machine, run it, reboot, run again, then a full system scan.

Time lost: about 2 hours.
Hourly rate: none of your business.

Re: Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[sadomikeyism]

You're talking to the CIO that moved the company to Microsoft products, right?

At least HE didn't catch the virus. He still gets his email printed out. His only risk is from papercuts.

Re:Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO

[ObiWanKenblowme]

If you take the numbers in the summary at face value, some quick math estimates your hourly rate at between $24,000 and $29,000. Need an assistant?

The Numbers

[RetiefUnwound]

Probably came from a 'Network Security Consultant', not a network engineer. The cost of course includes the hours billed by the consultant, who advises you on how to 'secure' your network.

Remember, a consultant is someone who'll steal your watch, then make you pay them to tell you the time.

HA HA HA

[dnahelix]

Securing your business against a virus: $58,000

Reading about it on my Mac: Priceless

It has to be said

[jsse]

MyDoom virus - $250M
400 or less employees - $58,000
DDOS SCO - priceless

There's some news money can't buy. For everything else, there's Slashdot. :)

Real Costs include

[vlad30]

Things such as repairing the machine after the virus is activated by dumb user

productivity lost by user, files lost etc.

severance pay for dumb user
hiring fees for the replacement (ad costs etc)

Of couse when the dumb user is also the boss/owner of the company it can cost a whole new computer just for starters (Dual G5 with everything) and a lot of time reshuffling computers to incorporate this one into the company plus new firewalls

Yep those viruses can be costly

Re:Why do you care?

[dbIII]

These numbers used to be in the billions of dollars,

That's right, the expected attack on SCO will cost them a BILLION dollars unless they can attach lasers to the heads of enough sharks in time. Some people expect others to beleive their fantasy worlds.

Re:Wasted time!

[tanveer1979]

The biggest cost of these sort of virus is time.

Umm, that means slashdot is more dangerous than all these virus! :)

Re:This is harsh, but it needs to be said

[Anonymous Coward]

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." (Rich Cook)

Re:Wasted time!

[David McBride]

The biggest cost of these sort of virus is time.

Umm, that means slashdot is more dangerous than all these virus! :)

Assuming, of course, that people who are reading slashdot would otherwise be doing something productive instead...

What is the Actual Cost of Slashdot Access?

[rimu guy]

Wow, this topic really got me thinking. All that time I spend every day deleting spam, driking coffee, having toilet breaks. It all adds up. It's amazing I every get time do any work.

In fact, I've just figured out that if we can shut down slashdot - maybe feature it on a front page article and get it slashdotted - we could scape together enough coin to fulfill George Bush Juniors plan of putting a person on Mars.

Do the math:

800,000 Readers a day
30 Minutes a day to scan the front page and browse at level 5
$30 Per hour wage, these are _mostly_ employed geeks after all
$24,000,000,000 Annual lost time cost, assuming a 40 hour week, 50 weeks of the year.

Total cost of MyDoom virus at my work.

[edunbar93]

I'm the sysadmin for a small ISP. Here's our rough figures:

New mail server, bought last February: $2500
FreeBSD 4.8: $0.
Qmail: $0.
Vpopmail: $0.
qmail-scanner: $0.
Spamassassin: $0.
F-prot antivirus for unix file servers: $400/year/server.
My time*: $3000.
Moving from sendmail to qmail and watching sendmail admins patching: priceless.
Moving from sendmail to qmail and watching server load averages go from 20 to 0.02: priceless.
Adding on spamassassin server wide and watching server load averages go from 0.02 to 3.0: well, it's still better than sendmail was.
Watching the server eat 30,000 viruses a day during the MyDoom attack after months of hard work: totally righteous.

There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's my Boss' Mastercard. Accepted in places where Open Source Software impresses geeks like me.

* I'd never before used any of the software listed above. It took a while to learn it all in between tech support calls.