I beleive some of you are mistaken when under judging the power of viruses... When judging the cost of viruses on a company you can not compare with 'vb viruses' that some script kiddy made. The truth is that there are far more viruses than vb macros. Imagine a viruses that when ran infects every.com/.exe file on your computer, or better yet resides in your masterboot record or BIOS itself?? These things that you call viruses will just lay resident in your system until a set option has occurred (xxx files infected, ??/??/?? has reached, Connected to the internet ect..) then they will create havoc on your system.
I will leave it to you to decide how much it would cost a company to get a modified CIH clone virus that sends itself through the e-mail to all the employees (mind you it looks like they are receiving it from a fellow employee) Then all of a sudden they open it out and BAM!!... nothing happens.. What you say? They all of a sudden 2 months down the road all of a sudden you find that the bios is filled with sh|t and you can not start your computer, so you go out to buy a new BIOS chip just to find out that F^ck your whole harddrive is erased...
Now of course this is a worst case viruses, more common viruses just get executed whenever a.exe/.com is executed and make your system run slow (intentially) so you may be running a virus on your 866 mhz that behaves like a 166 mhz... Now if that does not cost money than I do not know what does?
Anyways that is my two-cents-worth on costs of viruses.
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I beleive some of you are mistaken when under judging the power of viruses... When judging the cost of viruses on a company you can not compare with 'vb viruses' that some script kiddy made. The truth is that there are far more viruses than vb macros. Imagine a viruses that when ran infects every .com/.exe file on your computer, or better yet resides in your masterboot record or BIOS itself?? These things that you call viruses will just lay resident in your system until a set option has occurred (xxx files infected, ??/??/?? has reached, Connected to the internet ect..) then they will create havoc on your system.
I will leave it to you to decide how much it would cost a company to get a modified CIH clone virus that sends itself through the e-mail to all the employees (mind you it looks like they are receiving it from a fellow employee) Then all of a sudden they open it out and BAM!!... nothing happens.. What you say? They all of a sudden 2 months down the road all of a sudden you find that the bios is filled with sh|t and you can not start your computer, so you go out to buy a new BIOS chip just to find out that F^ck your whole harddrive is erased...
Now of course this is a worst case viruses, more common viruses just get executed whenever a .exe/.com is executed and make your system run slow (intentially) so you may be running a virus on your 866 mhz that behaves like a 166 mhz... Now if that does not cost money than I do not know what does?
Anyways that is my two-cents-worth on costs of viruses.