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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?"
The biggest cost of these sort of virus is time.
Time waiting for your 'net link to do what you've paid for it to do while your email server chokes on hundreds of incoming virus emails.
Time wasted by tech staff explaining to every user at least once to not click that file (or if the organisation has virus scanning) to ignore the ten dozen "virus has been nuked" warning emails.
Time wasted by staff who have to spend time ignoring this junk, replying to warnings about the thing from their naieve friends and family emailing then CNN URLs and saying, "is this for real?"
Time wasted making sure the company virus protection is up to date on laptop machines that get infected at home on 'raw' Internet connections then get plugged into the pristine corporate network in the morning. Time wasted fixing machine that weren't caught in time.
This sort of cost really adds up...
Do your math: you say between $48K and $58K per small biz, so let's take a lowly $50K average. The sum is supposed to be $250M, which is only 5000 times those $50K.
are there only 5000 small businesses out there?
i think not.
So those $48K to $58K must certainly be understood as a "worst case" figure applying only to a fraction of businesses out there
Any moron who works at a company and opens said attachment should be fired anyway.
...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.
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...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
In fact, I just had a vivid image of a doctor visiting a bunch of children in Iraq who'd lost limbs from playing with those cluster bombs that look like food packets and saying "You did what? Don't you retards know not to open unfamiliar packages?"
See how petty and insulting it sounds when it's in relation to another line of work? That's how the "dumb user" attitude makes tech workers look to people in other fields.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
The real reason for the inflated damage estimates is that it sounds impressive in the media, which generates FUD, which generates more viewers, which sells advertising space.
If a virus came out and the news reported it as causing "a few thousand dollars of damage across north america", would anyone give a damn? So the news directors and reporters try and figure out a more "interesting" damage estimate that they can broadcast. So, pump up those numbers! The virus caused $250 MILLION OF DAMAGES, suddenly sounds impressive and formidable.
It has about as much bearing as when the RIAA sues people for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars because "the song they had shared 'could' have been sent to everyone on the planet, thus depriving the record company of any profits whatsoever".
The reality is that in the office I work for, one person clicked on the attachment and got their machine infected. He continued working as normal and called the IT guys who came around and fixed it.
Total lost productivity time? A 30 second phone call. Total lost revenue? $0.
Compared to people just plain ol' "slacking on the job", viruses do a negligable amount of damage.
Funny how you never hear about the '$50 billion in lost revenue' from employees taking three 15-minute "smoke breaks" every day.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle