Conficker Worm economic lost is now Multi-billion

According to Cyber Secure Institute, Since October 2008, the Conficker worm has been the center of a great deal of attention and debate. To date, the Conficker worm has already infected computers ranging from 200,000 to more than 10 million. It has also demonstrated the ability to both end run security measures and establish communications with controlled computers despite major efforts. It has also consumed an extraordinary amount of time and energy by CIOs and cybersecurity experts from around the world.


Cyber Secure Institute claims that based on their previous studies into the average cost of such malware attacks, the economic loss due to the Conficker worm could be as high as $9.1 billion. 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 the details of 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 (greater than 200,000)—vastly less than all other sources suggest—the cost of this virus is still roughly $200 million dollars. It should, however be emphasized that these estimates do not factor in opportunity costs—just what could have been achieved if the expertise, time, energy and resources that have been devoted to combating this virus had been devoted to more productive efforts.

Read the full Cyber Secure Institute claims here

This article was found at zdnet.com