Zotob Damages Assessed

Some numbers are in regarding how widespread the Zotob worm has been. Zotob, which spread in August, 2005, seems to have been a relatively minor threat when compared to many other worms like Blaster and Sasser.

Six percent of survey respondents said Zotob's impact on their company was moderate to major, which was defined as more than $10,000 in losses and at least one major business system affected, such as e-mail or Internet connectivity.

Alarming as it was, Zotob did far less damage than did other major worms designed to exploit Windows vulnerabilities, Cybertrust said. For example, the Nimda worm made a moderate to major impact on 60 percent of companies. MSBlast (aka Blaster) struck about 30 percent of organizations to that degree, the firm said.

Source: Zotob damage deep but not widespread, published on ZDNet News: October 26, 2005, 12:33 PM PT.

I find this figure a bit surprising given the damage reported by the Chrysler corporation and how it affected manufacturing operations in addition to other large corporations. It's possible, however, that overall we're getting that much better at containing these things and the average damage really is very small.

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