The damage estimate seems plausible to me. My large, anonymous company (~1500 computers) was paralyzed by this virus. In spite of scores of $100+K/yr "experts" on staff, e-mail was down all day and, I believe, was only restored after a very expensive band of consultants was called in to repair the damage. No press release was issued to acknowlege the extent of the problem. I suspect that many large companies suffering similar problems have not stepped forward to publicly admit the extent of their damages. Only small companies with no technical staff who might have to eat crow are willing to admit the virus got them. -----Original Message----- From: Bob Ammerman To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Date: Monday, May 15, 2000 4:29 PM Subject: [OT] Love bug virus damage (was: Claim to be a Philippine Virus) >> >> 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.