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What's The Actual Cost of A Virus?

Posted by simoniker on from the return-to-sender dept.

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?"

10 of 526 comments (clear)

  1. Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO by DarkHelmet · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

    --
    /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
    1. Re: Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Funny


      > 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?

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    2. Re:Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO by red_mug · · Score: 3, Funny

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

      --
      unsig
    3. Re:Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO by way2trivial · · Score: 3, Funny
      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.

      --
      every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
    4. Re: Actual Cost of a Virus / SCO by sadomikeyism · · Score: 3, Funny
      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.

      --
      "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves
  2. The Numbers by RetiefUnwound · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    "Nothing is so important that you cannot make fun of it." -Clarke
  3. HA HA HA by dnahelix · · Score: 3, Funny

    Securing your business against a virus: $58,000

    Reading about it on my Mac: Priceless

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  4. Re:Wasted time! by tanveer1979 · · Score: 4, Funny
    The biggest cost of these sort of virus is time.

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

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  5. Re:Wasted time! by David+McBride · · Score: 3, Funny

    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...
  6. Total cost of MyDoom virus at my work. by edunbar93 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    "No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert