Conficker's estimated economic cost? $9.1 billion

"Despite that their analysis also considered a much limited infection rate (200,000 infected hosts), they claim that the cost of the virus in this case is still around $200 million. The research excludes an important fact though - not only is Conficker still active and infecting, but also, according to the most recent infection rate estimate courtesy of the Conficker Working Group, the number of infected hosts is 3.5 million.

"Here are more details from the analysis:

""Any analysis of the true impact of Conficker must also factor in the (wasted) time, resources, and energies of the cyber-community, governments, companies and individuals. Extrapolating out from studies on the average cost of similar past attacks, the total economic cost of this worm (including the cost of efforts to combat the worm, the cost of purchasing counter-measure software) could be as high as $9.1 billion. Even using the single, outlying data source that suggests a much more limited scope of infection (<200,000 --vastly less than all other sources suggest--the cost of this virus is still roughly $200 million dollars.""
(The article ends with "Personally, I never take these rough estimates seriously." If only this minimal level of skepticism were applied uniformly, across all of the Windows press-- ed.)

Complete Story

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