Summary: New estimates of the cost of turbulence and intrusion as applied to large businesses

Windows zombies are probably costing trillions of dollars to the economy. It depends on how one measures it, but a lot of what we do online and offline depends on the assumption that half of all Windows PCs are under control by someone other than the persons sitting before them. These are fairly conservative estimates that are being repeated by several separate sources and Microsoft can corroborate as a few months ago it said that one third of the machines it had scanned were in fact infected.

Cost of cyberattacks alone -- attacks that are carried out from Windows zombies for the vast part -- are estimated to have affected three quarters of enterprises and cost just over 2 million dollars on average (for each enterprise). Security vendors insist that most businesses keep breaches and attacks secret for all sorts of reasons, so the problem is underreported.

"OK, even allowing for the fact this comes from a newly published study (PDF) from a security company, that's still one heck of a statistic. The fact that it's Symantec, and so has access to perhaps more enterprises than most, makes it a double-heck with knobs on. Or how about this one for size: 'every enterprise, yes, 100 percent, experienced cyber losses in 2009.'"

eWEEK also has this new article about the Zeus botnet:

Zeus is among the most popular crimeware tool kits out there and was placed in the spotlight last week due to NetWitness' discovery of the Kneber botnet. In a discussion with eWEEK, security pros walk through some of the ways Zeus infiltrates organizations and discuss the importance of defense-in-depth as well as having sound policies governing the remediation and investigation process if infected by malware.

The article totally 'forgets' to mention Windows, but then again, it's an article from Microsoft's partner, Ziff Davis [1, 2, 3]. They would rather pretend it's just a "computer issue" or "malware", as usual. ⬆

"Our products just aren't engineered for security."

--Brian Valentine, Microsoft executive at the time, now working for Amazon as Senior Vice President