Worms Jack Up the Total Cost of Windows

rbrandis writes "Dealing with widespread worms like Sasser raises the cost of using Windows, a research analyst said Wednesday. "This is part of the carrying cost of using Windows," said Mark Nicolett, research director at Gartner. "The cost of a Windows environment has gone up because enterprises have to install security patches very rapidly, deal with outages caused by secondary problems with these patches, and deploy additional layers of security technology." "The Sasser worm attacks confirm our prediction that mass worm attacks against the multiple vulnerabilities disclosed by Microsoft on April 13 were likely," said Nicolett and his Gartner colleague, John Pescatore, in an alert posted on the Gartner site."

Comments

This would be why...

[clichekiller]

My PC is set to shut off after fifteen minutes of inactivity and my Mac has been on for nearly a month now. Even though I keep myself patched up to the nines I never quite trust keeping my XP machine on all the time. I figure that when I'm playing a game the machine is so preoccupied with what its doing that most external concerns will be ignored. Then it's off into standby for the machine. And this is behind 2 NAT firewalls and XP's own firewall. What level of paranoia I live with.