February 5, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- The MyDoom virus, considered the fastest and most devastating malware ever, has caused $43.9 billion in economic damage in 215 countries, according to a report by mi2g Intelligence Unit (mi2g.net), a digital risk firm.
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According to mi2g, the US, UK and France absorbed the most economic damage, followed by China, Australia, Canada, South Korea, Germany, Italy and Spain.
The total economic damage the MyDoom virus has wrought on the US is estimated by mi2g to be approximately 12.2 billion to 15 billion dollars.
Economic damage caused by the virus, according to mi2g, is calculated in terms of help desk support, overtime payments, false positives, loss of business, bandwidth clogging, productivity erosion, management time reallocation and cost of recovery.
Mi2g also warned that backdoors left open by the virus remain vulnerable for the launch of further attacks.
"With the benefit of 20:20 vision, we have now tried to give a real sense for where the extra cost has been introduced within organisations and homes across the globe as they have struggled to cope with the deluge of MyDoom infections and debris last week," says DK Matai, executive Chairman of mi2g. "There are still over a million computers with their back door left open by MyDoom. We must not forget that they could be hijacked and thus be used to mount a DDoS or another type of malware or spam attack in the near future."
Mi2g also warned that the MyDoom virus may be imitated by other hackers looking to launch distributed denial of service attacks (DDos) against other major Web sites in light of the few existing deterrents and the inability of Internet users to resist opening attachments.
