[Osiris]

Economic Cost of Conficker at $9.1 Billion?

I wonder how they arrived at this $9.1 billion figure. I mean, I understand the wasted time and resources thing but how do you get to a precise $9.1B? I wonder if they tabulated the cost of this study into the total or how much time was wasted sitting around on April 1st waiting for something to happen? Never mind, I can see how they arrived at that number now.

Any analysis of the Conficker worm’s impact 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.

[c0rr0sive]

Could be... I could believe it if it went above that, so many people spent time on trying to find out how to prevent against it... When it was a big dud... That or it was successful in the eyes of the writers...

[james.wired]

writing a worm that ends up costing the already drowning, and only getting worse, economy $9.1 billion that it doesn't have? I don't think it ended up being a dud in that sense.

[c0rr0sive]

You go to think, nearly every business, and company that learned of this ended up getting ontop of it. So it really didn't hurt the economy as much as it may be helping it in a way. Some places may have spent $300 or so, that isn't a large amount of cash for one place, once you start adding them all up, then you get into the large companys that are probably spending $30k-$40k now multiply that and so on... The places that did spend the money on this, are ones that could easily afford to....

[james.wired]

Good point, I didn't think of it in that way. I suppose a good $9.1 billion back in circulation can't hurt anyone, especially when it comes from the large companies that have the extra money like you said.