Computer Viruses Rose More Slowly in '02
Posted on: Thursday, 20 March 2003, 06:00 CST
NEW YORK (AP) - Computer virus infections rose more slowly in 2002, but a stronger breed meant the costs of recovery increased, a new survey found.
The 306 companies examined had more than 1.2 million virus incidents affecting 900,000 personal computers, servers and network-perimeter gateways, said ICSA Labs, a unit of TruSecure Corp. of Herndon, Va.
That's 113 infections a month for every 1,000 machines, up 10 percent from the 103 infections a month reported in the previous survey. The infection growth rate was about 13 percent in 2001 and 2000.
The most recent survey looked at virus attacks from July 2001 to last December.
The number of respondents who suffered virus disasters fell to 80, or 21 percent, from 84, or 28 percent, in 2001.
According to the report, disaster-causing incidents cost an average of $81,000 apiece, up from $69,000 in 2001.
The median cost was $9,500, up from $5,500, with the large gap reflecting the fact that a handful of companies report only disasters costing more than $1 million to fix.
ICSA Labs said these estimates, which are provided by technology workers and mostly reflect the IT department's costs, are probably low.
Including such costs as lost data, productivity and opportunity, the firm believes the complete per-incident cost is closer to $75,000 or $1 million.
In the survey, ICSA Labs defined a "disaster" as a virus that simultaneously affects 25 or more machines and that causes significant financial pain or damage to data.
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