Viruses and other digital threats have caused a record amount of economic damage this quarter, reports European-based digital risk firm mi2g.
In a report released today, mi2g says that in the first three months of this year, the economic damage from malware proliferation alone reached an all-time high of between $122 billion and $150 billion worldwide - more than the total for the whole of 2003, when damage was estimated at around $100 billion worldwide. Distributed denial-of-service attacks alone are estimated to have cost up to $4.1 billion worldwide this quarter.
The company says it calculates the economic impact on the basis of help-desk support costs, overtime payments, contingency outsourcing, loss of business, bandwidth clogging, productivity erosion, management time reallocation, cost of recovery, software upgrades, intellectual property rights violations, customer and supplier liabilities, and share price decline.
The firm also notes that the spam plague has reached record proportions, with 1.6 trillion spam messages being sent in the first quarter, causing estimated economic damage of up to $71 billion worldwide.
Netsky wins March cyberbattle
Meanwhile, anti-virus vendors report that the worst viruses of the past month were Netsky, MyDoom and Bagle variants. The cyberwar between the authors of Netsky and MyDoom appears to have been won by Netsky, which deleted MyDoom, Bagle and Mimail from infected machines and was the most prevalent worm this month.
Kaspersky Labs reports in its top 20 list of most prevalent viruses in March that Netsky.b accounted for 52.78% of the viruses reported. MyDoom.a was the second-most prevalent, accounting for 12.45%, followed by Netsky.d on 8.98%. Kaspersky Labs notes that the top 20 contained a record 11 new mail worms - five of them new Bagle variants.
Central Command reports that the Netsky family of worms dominated the charts. In its Dirty Dozen list of the worst computer viruses for March, Central Command says Netsky.d was most prevalent, on 35.9%, followed by Netsky.b on 16.3%, Netsky.p on 11% and Netsky.c on 4.8%.
MyDoom and Bagle variants were also among the month`s 12 most prevalent.
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