Virus Cost Estimate For 2001 Tops $10 Billion 239
Snootch writes: "CNN has a story on the costs of virii - they're absolutely collossal, and remember that the $10 billion figure is just *so far this year*...scary. The article gives a pretty good breakdown by virus, and while it says little else that the average /. reader won't know by now, it's an interesting read all the same. To quote Red Dwarf's Kryten, 'Smug Mode,' but I note that every single one mentioned in the article, bar one (Code Red), was a client-side Outlook virus ..."
"My other thought was this: Considering that according to the article, nearly half the money was spent cleaning infected systems out, then the virus-checker industry, and therefore the implications of Symantec's recent patent, are even bigger than I realised ... *gulp*" Of course, estimates like these are often made by people with vested interests in the effect such numbers have, and there are a lot of costs that are very tough to estimate accurately -- like sysadmin time.
Its been a long time.... (Score:1)
Re:Its been a long time.... (Score:2)
Mission critical (Score:1)
Re:Mission critical (Score:1)
I have a feeling NASA doesn't use outlook for email, or run unpatched systems, even if they did use IIS.
A professional company doesn't use microsoft to run everything, they know better.
Re:Mission critical (Score:2)
"I believe it must be true so I'll post it to slashdot even though I have no idea what the truth of the matter is"
NASA has for many years been failing to deploy desktop security from a Canadian company called Entrust. That means that their security infrastructure has to be running on W2K machines 'cos thats all Entrust support.
I find it interesting that the company I work for strips out Sircam virus using a plug in to their Exchange server while the MIT AI lab where I have a courtesy account still hasn't put a patch into their sendmail running on Slowlaris.
I still get about 200 Sircam messages a day on my AI account. Not a problem if I have a high bandwidth connection but my account is now unusable from a dialup modem.
The reason that most viruses attack Outlook is that it is much easier to access the outlook address book with a couple of lines of VB script than to parse the headers in the mail spool.
Re:Mission critical (Score:2)
I have a feeling NASA doesn't use outlook for email, or run unpatched systems, even if they did use IIS.
I dunno if NASA runs IIS, but I do hear that they run ISS.
-Rob
Re:Mission critical (Score:3, Insightful)
Even more ridiculously I am forced to do engineering work on a 64 MB Win 98 machine. When I tried to at least get more memory for the machine I was told that I didn't qualify: Engineers were considered in the same category as secretaries as far as their computer usage.
If it weren't for the (personally owned) Linux box I keep on my desk I couldn't get much useful work done.
The people who do the actual work at NASA are the sharpest group of people I've ever had the pleasure of working around - but like most places the upper management has more than its fair share of 'clueless techno ignorants' making decisions.
At least our computers are behind a firewall - so they don't get hacked all the time - but there are enough technically unsophisticated people (managers, secretaries etc.) on computers that viruses remain a problem.
Re:Mission critical (Score:3, Informative)
The cost to my company (Score:1, Interesting)
Sircam cost about $50, which is the hour it took me to update the 4 Windows machines in our sales office. This figure might be a little low because I didn't include the cost of hitting the delete key. Oh, and I added a procmail recipe I downloaded, but this was something like 2 minutes worth of work.
Re:The cost to my company (Score:2)
Re:The cost to my company (Score:2, Informative)
I work for a small R&D firm. My time is worth more to the company than my salary. Why? When I'm working on a contract, there's this little concept called overhead. For every dollar that I'm paid out of the contract, about two dollars from the contract are placed in the company overhead account. This provides the operating budget for the business. It pays the lights, rent, phones, secretaries, etc., but it doesn't pay my normal salary.
When I have to change hats to clean up after a virus, I'm being paid out of the overhead account. It's not billable time. When I'm not working on contract, it costs the company more money than just my salary. For every dollar that I earned cleaning up after SirCam, there was one dollar deleted from the overhead budget and two dollars that were not "earned" by overhead. In other words, for every dollar that I was paid to clean up after SirCam, the company lost three dollars from the operating/overhead budget--one dollar for my salary and two dollars in lost revenues. The contract dollars are still there, but my time is gone forever.
So just because I was already being paid, doesn't mean that it didn't cost the company money. It cost them a great deal. In the end, we figured that SirCam cost us about $2500, which is probably on the high end of the distribution. (We have a lot of unattended, networked computers scattered throughout the labs. Despite my repeated complaints, some of the researchers and graduate students still did not have anti-virus software on these computers. "But I never read email on that computer!" Half a dozen of them turned out to be infected with SirCam.)
If you accept the figure of $2500 dollars for our company, then it only requires 4000 similar infections to total $10 million in lost revenue. There were probably far more than 4000 infections. Is the number $10 Billion inflated? Probably, but it still cost a tremendous amount of money to fight SirCam.
Yes yes.... (Score:2)
If you are contracted out to others, and in this case, had to be retained that valuable time to clean up from Sircam, fine, that's a valid point.
Most places, though, have IT staff who are there to do such things.
Re:The cost to my company (Score:2)
Re:The cost to my company (Score:1)
Re:The cost to my company (Score:1)
Worms and viruses are not unique to an OS. All OS's can have worms or virii. If you want to brag about a lack of worms or virii then brag about your Netware servers or your Commodore 64. Unix is too vulnerable to brag about. It's simply that Unix has not yet been exploited as much.
Nope. Lion and Adore exploit only bugs in only certain versions of software, contrary to virii written for M$ systems. Unix is much less vulnerable than M$ windows, not to mention binary incompatibility, malicious binaries don't work on all Unix or Linux systems, it all discourage virii coders, from technical aspect they can not make such havoc as in M$ systems.
So we're talking either Microsoft or Microsoft? (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering Code Red's favorite food, that's pretty much a clean sweep for Microsoft, isn't it?
I guess they do bring something to the total user experience that you can't get from anyone else.
Gotta run. A whole bunch of people hae sent me files they need my advice on.
Re:So we're talking either Microsoft or Microsoft? (Score:1)
Re:"virii" is incorrect. (Score:2)
All of this probably sounds very complicated if you don't know Latin or another inflected language but it actually isn't that hard. There are just a lot of fancy names for things.
I am usually in favor of using Latin plurals for Latin words (and Greek plurals for Greek words, and Italian plurals for Italian words, and German plurals for German words, and so on), but in this case, by pluralizing it correctly you risk confusing too many people. Just use viruses. However, if you are translating an English document that contains the word "viruses" (I can't imagine why you would do that though), translate it as "vira".
Re:"virii" is incorrect. (Score:2)
Re:"virii" is incorrect. (Score:2)
Re:Monopoly or innovation? (Score:2)
Let me be the first to tell the truth, here... (Score:1, Interesting)
Most virus damage is caused by half-baked, slipshod, poorly-thought-out products put out by our friends in Redmond.
Period.
As a unix sysadmin working at a very large enterprise hosting facility, I can tell you this, first hand. The Windows team is constantly chasing after red worms, melissa, various IIS exploits, and every imaginible form of macro virus, while the Solaris team calmly applies regular patches from Sun.
I'd say for every single Solaris 8 box that gets pushed over or otherwise compromised due to a virus, there are *seriously* about 50 Windows boxes that need to be scanned/cleaned/reinstalled.
Again, not trying to start a religious war, but viruses are a microsoft byproduct. Not that Microsoft is a bad thing, mind you, but I think its safe to say that most of the viruses in the world wouldn't exist without a little help from poor quality control at microsoft.
Re:Let me be the first to tell the truth, here... (Score:1)
if Unix had as many users, it would suffer the same fate.
Re:Let me be the first to tell the truth, here... (Score:1)
Re:Let me be the first to tell the truth, here... (Score:1)
hence an attack against windows will effect more boxes then an attack against Unix computer.
But I agree than Windows boxes are not as scure as Unix. And in servers, Unix (currently, this is fading thou.) outway Windows.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Let me be the first to tell the truth, here... (Score:1)
Re:Let me be the first to tell the truth, here... (Score:3, Insightful)
What looks better to Joe Consumer:
1. "New and Improved Security makes sure that port scanners are unlikely to determine services running on your system, thereby helping the internet work faster for most people"
or
2. "Fancy new Paperclip tells you funny jokes!"
The second will get them more sales a lot faster than the first.
Re:Let me be the first to tell the truth, here... (Score:1)
On the other hand, the variety of unix distros probably makes them fairly resistant to many broad attacks anyway. Also unix's user friendly qualities probably work against virus writers and script kiddies.
mechanism for accountability? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not saying that MS should be ponying up billions for Outlook's defects (esp. since estimates of the value of "lost time" always seem to be generous; witness the costs of "being stuck in traffic" as being huge) but if there is some desire to reduce the widespread incidence of viruses, then there should be some mechanism, prefereably financial, for encouraging people not to create and sell vulnerable products.
Re:mechanism for accountability? (Score:1)
outlook (Score:1, Offtopic)
10 bill? yeah *right* (Score:2, Insightful)
This sentence should read "arbitrary figure made up to inflate costs of viruses". What the hell are "regular responsibilities" if they don't include helping users get rid of viruses. We all know that viruses are annoying, cost a little bit of money, etc etc - but even if each and every computer ever affected by a virus this year was attended by a tech charging 50 bucks an hour (and who needs an hour to get rid of sircam?!), we're looking at a 3 billion dollar bill. Not 10 billion.
It's yet another hype article. Bring in a story queue which we can moderate, like Kuro5hin, because the newsworthy to nonsense ratio is worsening all the time.
btw, the plural of viruses is... well, I just wrote it. Look at the latin root of "virus" and you'll understand. Or just google for "virii" (34k hits) vs "viruses" (1.4m hits). Nuff said.
Re:10 bill? yeah *right* (Score:1)
If regular responsibilities include helping users get rid of viruses, then it follows that part of the cost of maintaining a regular staff is attributable to virus damages. Every hour we spend eliminating viruses at work, is an hour we could spend reading slashdot.
Re:10 bill? yeah *right* (Score:1)
No, you're dead wrong. (Score:2)
"Viruses" is correct, "virii" is not. Look it up in a dictionary if you don't believe me: http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=vir us [dictionary.com]
Whom is a direct object. "To whom" is correct, "to who" is not.
In the same manner, saying "between you and I" is incorrect; "between you and me" is correct.
You'd never say "Give that to I," now would you?
Honestly, people, correct grammar is neither difficult nor time consuming. Hell, I went to a US High School and all this was taught in English class. What the hell is your excuse?
plural of viruses determination (Score:2)
I'm not going to argue whether or not you're correct, but the way in which you've proven your correctness is pretty lame. All you've shown is which form is more popular, not more correct.
There's this saying you might have heard, "The masses are asses."
Re:plural of viruses determination (Score:2)
In the english lanuage, popularity does equal corectness (sonner or later)...
hey, at least it didn't spread... (Score:2)
Smug Mode (Score:5, Interesting)
My feeling is that most of these are Microsoft-based worms because that is the most popular platform. (And perhaps the users are less concerned about computers than we are.) There have been plenty of exploitable holes in pine, for instance; it's just that not enough people use the same version of pine for a successful worm to be built around it.
I think perhaps this is an argument for diversity more than it is an argument against Microsoft.
Re:Smug Mode (Score:5, Insightful)
I think perhaps this is an argument for diversity more than it is an argument against Microsoft.
From my point of view, an argument for diversity is an argument against Microsoft. My beef with Microsoft is not I don't like their stuff-- it's that I can't choose to use something else and have the pleasure of completely ignoring them. People still send me attachments in Word format, or require that presentations be in PowerPoint format. Web extentions still work on Windows only. I can freely ignore the Mac in everything I do. Windows users can freely ignore Linux in everything they do. But nobody can completely ignore Microsoft, simply because it's so prevalent.
And, to the topic at hand, that includes viruses. I know of servers running sendmail on a Unix box that had to go out of their way to delete SirCam messages from users' mailboxes, because they were huge and filling up the space available. This happens because most of the E-mail sending world is using Microsoft products.
Although the vindictive part of me would love to see Microsoft wither and die, in reality that's not what I want. What I want is for them to no longer be a monopoly or a near-monopoly. I want file formats and communications protocols to be open standards, so that anybody can develop software (proprietary or not) that will let users communicate with other users, each using whatever the hell he wants. And, then, yes, I want it so that no single virus are security hole can so easily affect 90% of the internet all at once.
All of this diversity is at the moment squelched by Microsoft. An argument for diversity is the strongest, and most important, argument against Microsoft as it exists today. The cost of viruses is only the most obvious and urgent manifestation of this. There are more severe long-term costs of a monopoly on something so basic as computer infrastructure.
-Rob
Re:Smug Mode (Score:1)
Re:Smug Mode (Score:3, Interesting)
just a quick not, Word & PowerPoint & Eceel docs can be read in other apps. You can live with out/
They are never read in perfectly, in my experience. Sometimes it fails altogheter. It's still a proprietary format, and the controller of that format keeps it a moving target. You may argue whether this is the intent, but the effect is to thwart and delay those who try to make other products compatable.
But while we're talking lost productivity costs: how much productivity has been lost by developers of other products (including open source ones such as KOffice and OpenOffice) by having to write import/export filters by reverse engineering Microsoft formats? How much further along would those products be if they only had to support an open, well-documented product?
The fact that these things all have to be Microsoft compatable to be viable merely proves my point. Those of us who choose not to use Microsoft OSes and apps can't simply ignore Microsoft, but have to dance to their tune. Even if some have learned the dance, I regret that it was necessary.
-Rob
Forgetting History... (Score:5, Insightful)
Code Red
The Code Red worm [cert.org] is a typical worm that exploits a buffer overflow just like the Morris Internet Worm [mit.edu] and the Ramen worm [ciac.org] before it. Either of the aformentioned worms could have done what code red did once they had 0wn3d the boxen, they just happened not to.
Heck, I've toyed with writing a proof of concept *nix verison of Code Red using wu-ftp vulnerabilities [redhat.com], rpc.statd vulnerabilities [www-arc.com], telnetd vulnerabilities [cert.org], sendmail vulnerabilities [llnl.gov] and even BIND vulnerabilities [ciac.org]. Of course, I haven't gone much further than deciding what exploits to use and glancing at some source since I'm busy with school at the moment and more importantly I don't want to go to jail.
Sircam
The Sircam worm [cert.org] spread either through social engineering or across unprotected network shares. Neither of these requires Outlook. It didn't grab addresses out of the address book and instead grabbed them from the user's web cache. Sircam also didn't use the client mailer to mail itself out but instead included it's own mail program.
Thus all Sircam needed to spread was clueless users. This only thing Microsoft-y about this worm is that it ran on Windows.
All the above said, it is truly sad that on almost all popular platforms we are stil dealing with a 30 year old security problem whose causes and solutions have been known from probably before a sizable number of the slashdot population was born.
Re:Forgetting History... (Score:2)
The ease of social engineering depends on more than just the user. Outlook Express has a lousy warning message (something like "be sure you trust the person who sent this file") that often appears when running safe attachments such as jpg files. Windows 98 uses extensions (rather than special icons or a +x file mode) as the distinction between programs and documents.
If a large percentage of users encounter dialog fatigue after a security warning appears multiple times when it shouldn't, or can't memorize the 10+ "dangerous" extensions, you have to reconsider whether it's really right to call the Outlook vector "social engineering".
Outlook worms don't use vulnerabilities at all (Score:2, Insightful)
At no point in this process does it rely on anything in Outlook that can be really called an "exploit", like a buffer overflow bug. Outlook itself is the exploit. The worm doesn't need to do anything that Microsoft hadn't planned for people to be able to do. There is only one step in this process that relies on human frailty. The rest of it is simple API calls to functionality that Bill and Co. decided to make available to executable email attachments. Outlook (anything that uses Microsoft's "Windows Scripting Host") is excellently designed to host worms and provide services to them as they infect a network.
Windows does give you a warning when you are about to open something that has executable content in it (HTML with JavaScript, Excel documents with VBA scripts, etc.). Microsoft has seen fit to cram executable content into so many different file types that every single attachment you ever open from anybody gives you this warning. It's like the boy who cried wolf. But this is the extent to Microsoft's approach to security. It doesn't stretch much further than the "hey, do you want me to run this?" dialog box (if they even give you that). They just don't take security seriously at all.
Now Microsoft is not full of stupid people. The decision to include executable content in emails must have raised alarm bells concerning security. They must have realized the vulnerable state they were putting everyone in. And how did they handle it? By reprogramming their OS and application suites to properly implement security and handle code from unknown sources with the appropriate level of caution? No, that would be too much work, and then people might complain that the security was getting in their way. So this is how they handle it: they put in a dozen lines of code that show you that little ubiquitous dialog box (unless you've checked "never show this dialog box again" on it before), and they extract a boolean from your confused and sorry ass. Then they branch there. If anything bad happens now, it's your fault.
Just a bit smug. (Score:2)
That's true. And they have. You've mentioned the Ramen worm (which was actually more complex than Code Red - taking advantage of 3 exploits). There was li0n. And sadmind (spreading accross Solaris machines, then defacing IIS sites).
They're out there. There are plenty of Linux and Solaris servers to populate. Where's the big outcry and doom stories accompanying all the horrid damage done by these worms?
There are a few possible things happening here. Its possible these systems are better administered - set up and actively administered by knowledgable administrators. Its possible that these machines aren't deployed with everything possible running. Its also possible that these platforms are simply easier to secure and patch.
In any case, the smuggness isn't entirely out of place.
Re:The end of an era! (Score:2)
There is innoculation in the form of patches and anti-virus. If kept up to date you will see very little damage from these problems.
Re:Smug Mode (Score:1)
Original Report (Score:2)
I have to say, I agree with the point about vested interests (and yes, this company has good reason to exagerate the claims). At least they are being honest about giving estimates - how many times have we heard about court cases where the prosecution charged a hacker with exactly $1,764,726,818.76 worth of damage [well, er, none actually - but you get the point!]?
Yes, $10 bill sounds like alot. However, this is from the same company [computereconomics.com]:
Migraine headaches cost American businesses between $5.6 and $17.2 billion in lost work productivity a year...
A Different Question (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm inclined to believe that the figure of $10 billion is little more than a wild guess. But since we're spending time trying to put a price on lost time and data, I have a different question along the same general lines:
Disregarding viral infections, how much money does American business lose annually to Windows crashing?
Schwab
Re:A Different Question (Score:1)
Re:A Different Question (Score:2)
Re:A Different Question (Score:2)
I'd wager it's a smaller number than losses due to incompatibilities arising from some new program (like a fancy screensaver) overwriting files like c:\windows\msvcrt.dll with the version it wants.
10 billion fooey. (Score:3, Interesting)
But I have little faith on the 'loss valuations' put forth like this.
If I have to disinfect all 50 computers in here over the course of a year, I'm not going to claim my company 'lost' any money, even though my time IS worth money. I would have been here, and been paid, regardless of the virus being here or not.
The same goes for cost valuations done because of website defacements 'cracking' etc.... they are rarely rooted in reality, but instead rooted in a numbers game to make it seem worse than it is.
Re:10 billion fooey. (Score:1)
Re:10 billion fooey. (Score:2, Insightful)
Sircam was not an outlook specific virus (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sircam was not an outlook specific virus (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem here is that in Microsoft Office "opening a document" actually means "running an application," which is evil, twisted, and just plain wrong.
UNIX would be rife with similar holes to Mirosoft products if it used a wacky binary file format that random shell commands would be run from if you attempted to cat(1) the file...
SirCam? (Score:5, Informative)
Hello? SirCam? It's an executable. It's mentioned in the article. It's a Windows executable, but it will happily infect people running Eudora on Windows, supposing of course that they are dumb.
It is another victory for the guys at Redmond, of course.
Re:SirCam? (Score:1)
~Philly
Re:SirCam? (Score:2)
However, somebody who just blindly used an email program that was downloaded and installed by the house's local teenager, might well be. ;)
I have to agree... (Score:1)
On a personal note, it was nice to see that SirCam got some press. Since it came out, the only thing I've read about it aside from
M$ user for 10 years... never gotten a virus (Score:2, Troll)
Re:M$ user for 10 years... never gotten a virus (Score:1, Funny)
If Outlook is bad, then the whole Microsoft Windows/Outlook/Office/IIS/IE package is crap! That's the way it was designed.
While we're on that topic.... (Score:1, Redundant)
to harm or not to harm (Score:1)
As for the case of outlook, VBScript can be very powerful esspecilly so with each newer version of office, when put to good use that is.
Overblown cost estimates... (Score:4, Insightful)
...have one reason and one reason only. Those in the appropriate industries like to have a lot of attention to these overblown cost estimates, so that the next time they're lobbying Congress for some law that will hand over more and more power over individual conputer users to "responsible" corporations, Congress will see the huge cost of not passing the legislation, and bang, we've got the next DMCA, or individual-restricting "internet security" law, or whatever.
I agree that viruses cost money. Time, productivity, equipment, and work is all lost when a virus hits your system. There are real losses. But these gigantic estimates that keep coming up -- Bullshit. They're estimates made by pegging every conceivable factor to one end of the scale. Have a security person on staff? Estimate that 100% of the cost of keeping that person on staff is due to "viruses," and add it into your cost estimate. Hell, I'm sure that they add in 100% of the time employees spend by the water cooler during a virus infection. "They can't work because there's a virus on their computer!" Of course, this assumes that when there is no virus, employees spend 0 time by the water cooler.
These estimates are probably less bullshit than the estimates that the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and AAP come up with due to losses from piracy. I saw one in the paper, where you would have to assume that every illegal MP3 downloaded from the internet would have to then be passed on to 10 other people who would have definitely bought the CD, but did not because they received the free MP3. Obviously, a completely bullshit estimate, but there it is, Congress sees it, and no responsible person can then argue that we don't need laws to stop this economic hemorrhaging.
Note: I have no actual evidence to back up my conspiracy theory. But I do believe beyond a doubt that the cost estimates we read for these things are hugely overblown, and you do have to admit that such overestimating such cost estimates could potentially benefit those trying to provide positive spin for DMCA-like corporate-graft legislation.
-Rob
Either Viri or Viruses (Score:2, Informative)
The correct plural for virus is either viri or viruses. Viruses is the English way to form the plural, and viri is the Latin way of doing it. Personally, I prefer the Latin way since it sounds more elegant.
Re:Either Viri or Viruses (Score:1)
There are, however, some words that have double `i's as plural endings - I can't remember any offhand, but I remember their existance (and there is always the troublesome verb `to go', whose imperative singular is always disputed - is it `i' or `ii'? and is that pronounced doubled in the second case, or just stressed? I admit, latin is almost as screwy as english, and neither are perfect in any measure. Let's all switch to esparanto).
vmyths.com (Score:4, Interesting)
It's definitely recommended reading for any geek. The introductory section is here [vmyths.com].
I don't buy these numbers. These exorbitant figures are created from generous estimates of downtime, repair costs, and so forth. In addition, they take into consideration elements only tangentially related; I think that anybody with their Michael Shermer [skeptic.com] hat on can tell that a more serious inquiry than this is required.
(But, then again, this would be good fodder for anti-Microsoft arguments. Now how ethically responsible would that be?)
Like Y2K -- how much is real viruses? (Score:2)
Including patching or AV software costs is rather dubious -- OSes need maintenance and their bugs/vulnerabilities fixed.
Re:Like Y2K -- how much is real viruses? (Score:1)
If you have to guess, might as well make it BIG (Score:5, Funny)
1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
3. Two days of editing cost $367. `
4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.
6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a twelve- page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the hardware expenses. Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor. Thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. Twenty-two thousand dollars for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the twelve-page Document.
So using the same rule, you can see these adjusters running around asking, "Was this PC infected by a virus last year?", "yes", "Ok, that's one $2000 PC and one $100 Outlook License, plus one hour labor, lets see, that comes to $2220 lost productivity, NEXT!".
Re:If you have to guess, might as well make it BIG (Score:2)
Yes, check the third bullet on my Drug War II post. [slashdot.org]
But but but Microsoft sorted this all out! (Score:2)
Re:But but but Microsoft sorted this all out! (Score:2, Interesting)
Filtering for 'I love you' - True Story (Score:1)
So, I decided to ask a friend who actually got the worm to send it to me. I was quite surprised that it was sent OK.
A few weeks later, a student came to me with a strange problem. A message he sent bounced. I checked the bounce, and to my surprise, it was bounced due to server restrictions. I checked the message and it turned out to be a real love letter to that student's SO. It turned out that the filter they installed simply filters out any message with "I love you" in the subject.
Realizing this was the problem, I told the student to try a diffrent subject line, and then the message worked OK.
People do the strangest things...
Aristotelian Logic (Score:1)
All viri are source code. All source code is free speech. Free speech is protected under the constitution. Therefore all viri are protected under the constitution.
DMCA version
Microsoft wrote the code that the virus creators used to kill the machines of the users that used the code that Microsoft wrote. Therefore Microsoft owns the viri.
Re:Aristotelian Logic (Score:1)
Aircraft manufacturer's have been sued because they made "defective" aircraft that will run out of fuel and crash.
If Microsoft made "defective" tools that allow a Virus to be written, they should be held responsible under the same perverted logic that blames the aircraft manufacturer when the user was at fault.
Virus != Bug!!! (Score:1)
ambiguity (Score:2, Insightful)
TCO comparisons (Score:1)
Disturbing article (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, I would like to know how these news stories keep coming up with monetary figures to represent mostly intangible concepts. Sure, there's a scientific way to go about it, but I know that I wasn't surveyed, so the results of such a process are at least flawed.
Secondly, I have three distinct and conflicting views about virii. Mostly, I find them a nuisance and a pain in the ass to deal with. I also find them entertaining. It's like a great big joke, we get to watch M$ hang its ass in the wind - and we get to see M$'s fervent supporters run around like headless chickens for a while. I also find virii to be a necessary part of our daily electronic lives.
That being said, the reason I find this article (and others like it) so disturbing is because we are seemingly paving the way for a whole new onslaught of legislation against computer virii. Let's be realistic: virii do -for free- what an entire industry fails to do with regularity - identify security holes. Almost 100% of the time, these holes are found in M$ products, which we all know are used by virtually every person in the online world. If virus writers didn't exploit these holes for their own entertainment, it would be much, much easier for malicious people to exploit these holes for their own gain and/or to the serious detriment of the victim.
Based on that, the only news in this article is found between the lines.
Code Red - Use the Present Tense please... (Score:4, Interesting)
All of these articles that I have been reading lately discuss Code Red and Code Red II in the past tense. Its still out there folks and its still attacking systems. I just ran a scan of my log file for one of my systems and the following IPs attempted to attack the webserver (which is running Linux/Apache and doing just fine):
216.175.70.25 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:04:16:29 PST
61.129.37.165 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:10:47:55 PST
216.254.153.209 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:13:58:40 PST
62.110.109.5 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:14:01:40 PST
216.75.67.200 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:14:25:52 PST
216.210.235.68 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:14:32:04 PST
216.254.2.43 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:19:13:21 PST
195.128.198.2 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:20:40:38 PST
200.204.61.28 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:21:09:45 PST
ip244.54.136.216.in-addr.arpa which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:22:30:24 PST
209.88.144.24 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:22:52:19 PST
209.88.144.24 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:22:53:36 PST
216.72.50.157 which attacked at 31/Aug/2001:22:54:32 PST
61.175.90.219 which attacked at 01/Sep/2001:01:18:38 PST
24.176.223.88 which attacked at 01/Sep/2001:01:25:49 PST
216.224.75.34 which attacked at 01/Sep/2001:01:49:07 PST
212.38.187.178 which attacked at 01/Sep/2001:02:45:22 PST
Now the number of attacks goes down on the weekenend and up during the week, which suggests that most of these addresses (if not all of them) are simply DHCP desktop boxes run by morons who are too stupid to download and install a patch that has been widely mentioned in the news. But the fact remains that this worm is out there and active on a ton of systems and should *not* be spoken of in the past tense.
Just my 0.45 Cents Canadian...
Re:Code Red - Use the Present Tense please... (Score:3, Insightful)
Is the patch you mention really a "security patch" or is it a "service pack" or is it "an upgrade"???
Perhaps the "morons" are a little ticked off at "security patches" that also include a bunch of other stuff that has no business being in a "security patch"
"security patch = security patch"
"security patch != service pack"
"security patch != update"
Maybe we have discovered a significant (albeit minor) explaination why Joe User has not bothered to keep up with all the latest "security patches" because they are not security patches. Instead the secuirty patch is bundled with other stuff creating a "non-security patch"
Microsoft service pack DISABLED competitor's... (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. The latest Microsoft Internet Explorer "service pack" DISABLED another company's software (QuickTime). This kind of sneakiness makes upgrading impossible for the average user. You must be technically knowledgeable and well-informed to defend yourself against this kind of behavior.
Re:Code Red - Use the Present Tense please... (Score:2)
Similarly for SirCam. The Freeciv mailing list had to set up an attachment filter this week, due to the continued bombardment with requests for advice.
Do something about it then (Score:2)
There's a apache script that works a lot like this, someone care to post the link?
:) (Score:2)
The time lost is real. I must have spent at least 16 work hours patching, researching and explaning to others in the office who "needed" to know. Thats about 500 dollars of lost money for my company.
Anyhow, check out my homepage for a graph of the code red hits my web server has taken
Jeremy
It's mostly opportunity cost (Score:2)
Lessee, 120 employees times 20 hours over the past year times $60 CDN per hour per employee, that's $144,000 just for the medium sized IT shop I work at.
Of course that's mostly opportunity cost. Not too much of it would have been billed directly to clients, but we would have produced better software with fewer bugs and more features. (Not to downplay the term opportunity cost, it is valid to worry about such things...)
Pedantic Man: The plural of virus is NOT virii (Score:2)
This page explains in great detail why not:
http://language.perl.com/misc/virus.html [perl.com]
Additional support:
http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=vir us [dictionary.com]
A search on Google for "viruses" turns up 1,480,000 hits.
A search on Google for "virii" turns up 38,200 hits.
Any technical literature written by professionals will NEVER EVER USE THE WORD VIRII! IT'S NOT A REAL WORD! The plural of "virus" is "viruses"!
http://www.mcafee.com [mcafee.com] - on the FRONT PAGE the word "viruses" is printed several times. "Virii" is not.
http://www.centralcommand.com [centralcommand.com] - same deal.
I'm going to keep posting this on every virus story that comes up until everyone gets the damn hint!
All MS money belong to us, (Score:3, Interesting)
Some Microsoft figures:
Annual Sales: $25 billion
Annual earnings before taxes: $11 billion
Profit: 7.7 Billion
This shows us that MS contributed approximately 0 dollars to the economy. That's what I call a well put together scam. If punitive damages were awarded, MS would soon be history, and Billy Boy would move from his mansion to some shelter.
While the lottery is a tax on the mathematically challenged, MS is a tax on the computer illiterati.
Re:All I can say is... (Score:1)
Re:All I can say is... (Score:1)
Re:All I can say is... (Score:1)
Nope. Technically spreading virii unintentionally like in M$ windows doesn't work in GNU/Linux due to [read/write] file permissions. Also, clicking on a malicious program compiled for Linux won't make any damage to the system since Linux is run from a users account, no way to infect system files because a computer virus needs write permission on system files to replicate. Also, on GNU/Linux system it is hard to spread a virus specific to certain e-mail applications like we are witnessing collosal spreading of Code Red for M$ web server, and other virii written for M$ Outlook, because there is no default email application in GNU/Linux distributions as it is M$ Outlook in M$windows.
Re:All I can say is... (Score:1)
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/te/9419/1.ht ml [heise.de] (in german).
Re:All I can say is... (Score:1)
(ok thats prob a bs number, but put Windows Vs Linux on the desktop (which is the biggest play ground for Viriis) and Windows (in the amount of users department) kicks linux, HARD!)
please note: As a server, or a geek os, I have nothing against Linux. I can install & run it. I just see very little point (as I do not use a server at home, and if I did, I'd be using BSD/Solaris, but hey...)
Re:I run Windows & Outlook, never had a proble (Score:1)
Win2X should read Win9X, as I am shure you can guess, but the simple minded, stupid buggers out there will compain about it for days.
You know the ones, the ones without arguments, or points, and have to compain about spelling/grammer/typos...
Re:No pity... (Score:2)
If I *know* that my actions are going to hurt your system, and I do them, then it doesn't matter *how* I did what I did; I should be guilty.
Simply writing a virus? No. Shoudln't be illegal.
Sending it out to a spam list in order that people will run it? Your intent is obvious. You wasted people's time and money ON PURPOSE. You knew the effect of what you were doing.