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Re: Calcuating Loss


From: Anders B Jansson <hdw () kallisti se>
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 18:44:20 +0200

Well if you fail to take proper preventive action and a couple of offices go down for a day or two you will have a loss.

Or as you correctly state, a lack of income.

But the resources used to clean up and/or reinstall some hundred boxes after such an incident can even technically be indentified as a loss.

Can you blame that loss on the virus/worm writer?
Even if you didn't take the recommended preventive action?

I think you can.

If you take you car for a drive, and is killed by a drunk driver, the drunk is to blame, even if you didn't wear your seatbelt.

If you leave your house unlocked and someone walks in and steals your computers, the theif is still to blame.

The fact that you have to be an idiot to leave your house unlocked, drive without your seatbelt or neglect preventive security doesn't really shift the blame or negate your loss.

// hdw

Michael Schaefer wrote:
Loss?

One of my biggest complaints is the way the industry "loses billions" whenever a virus or worm breaks out.

I mean, securing and maintain your server is not a loss. Installing and updating your anti virus or IDS package is not a loss. All of these things should have been done anyway.

If a server goes off line, I guess you could measure the revenue it may have produced as a loss, but technically, that is lack of income, not true loss.

If you see someone complaining about all the money they lost doing what they should have been doing all along, I just see spin. And politics.

M




Michal Zalewski wrote:

If we must toy with bogus marketspeak "equations", shouldn't E - at the
very least - numerically correspond to the consequences (loss?) caused by
an event, rather than being an event itself?


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