> >> An "idiot" that caused $4.4 billion worth of damage.
>
> Say what?  The "$$$ damage" reports for computer crackers have always
> seemed pretty suspect to me - similar to the "street values" reported
> for large drug seizures.  I mean, where do you actually GET $4.4
> billion?  X million computers infected, each of took a "computer expert"
> (worth $$$/hour, of course) some time to fix?  NNN systems offline for
> YY hours, at an average revenue rate of $$$, or charged CPU rate of $$?
> Gimme a break.  Like anyone actually paid extra for someone to fix this,
> or lost an order when they were offline that didn't come in later.  I
> hear much of the lost time was in assorted government agencies?  Maybe
> that ought to count as a benefit!

I was paid for 3 hours by a customer to figure out what was going on and
disinfect several of their PC's and instruct them on 'safe computing' on the
day the virus first hit. By the way, by reading the virus source code, I
found several registry entries that the virus tweaks which were (are?) not
listed in the symantec disinfection instructions.