Love Bug Losses Estimated At $6.7 Bil, Still Mounting
The ILOVEYOU worm and its family of mutations have caused an estimated $6.7 billion in productivity losses and the price tag will go up even more, an economic analyst said today.
The virus is still popping up in e-mail boxes of corporations, governments and home users worldwide, six days after it slipped into millions of computers in its drive across Asia, Europe and the Americas, said researchers at Computer Economics.
Analyst Samir Bhavnanim told Newsbytes that losses are estimated by using a formula based on loss of production and the number of people who received the e-mails in companies, governments and homes worldwide. "We basically took the number of people who received the e-mail and came up with a median impact number" under several categories ranging from minimal to maximum impact, he said.
"People were affected greatly in that they lost communications from a period of four hours up to five, and now, six days," said Bhavnanim. Many of the corporate systems are still shut down to guard against further infection. "They're being cautious," he said. "They're looking at a lesser of two evils. What if that bug still resides on their system?"
After one day, an estimated 47 million people had received the Love Bug, and 1.9 million opened the attachment to release the worm. "This is a form of economic terrorism," Bhavnanim said.
The search for the culprits behind the ILOVEYOU virus is concentrated in the Philippines, a country Bhavnanim says is not well-equipped to deal with finding the creator of a computer virus. "The Philippines is a Third World country and has other things than a computer virus to concern themselves with." A 28-year-old Filipino suspected of being involved in the Love Bug case was released and authorities are now reportedly searching for his live-in girlfriend.
Computer Economics can be found on the Web at http://www.computereconomics.com.
Reported by Newsbytes.com, http://www.newsbytes.com.