Fergie's Tech Blog

Conficker's Estimated Economic Cost? $9.1 Billion

Dancho Danchev writes on the ZDNet "Zero Day" Blog:

In a recent blog post, the 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.

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.

The number of Conficker infected hosts is in fact much higher than the number provided by the Conficker Working Group in the sense that behind a single IP there may be many other hosts NAT-ed in the local network, adding up yet another variable that has the potential to undermine such estimates.

posted by Fergie @ 4/23/2009 02:56:00 PM