Fergie's Tech Blog

Zotob/IRCbot Cost $97K per Company

Via Red Herring.

The Zotob worm that crippled corporate computer networks in mid-August cost infected businesses an average of $97,000 to clean up, but its impact was milder than the Slammer or Sasser worm outbreaks, a security software company said Thursday.

Some 61 percent of the organizations hit by Zotob reported that cleaning their systems required more than 80 hours of work, Cybertrust said. The healthcare industry experienced the greatest Zotob impact with 26 percent of companies experiencing problems from Zotob, compared to 7 percent of financial institutions.

Cybertrust surveyed 700 companies about the Zotob worm’s impact.

The worm began to spread four days after Microsoft released a note on August 9 detailing a vulnerability in its plug-and-play feature for Windows 2000. The worm, which propagated by installing a backdoor entry in infected computers, spread quickly because many corporate users failed to download the patch in time to prevent an outbreak in their networks.

posted by Fergie @ 10/27/2005 01:11:00 PM