Home Page | Skip to Navigation | Skip to Content | Skip to Search | Skip to Footer

Case Study: The Real Cost of Worm Outbreaks

The Situation
A large enterprise had come under attack from the Blaster worm, infecting thousands of desktops and servers. After calculating the losses caused by the worm, the organization realized that the damage caused by the Blaster infection far outweighed investing in an internal security solution.

The Company:
Industry: Manufacturing
Number of employees: Over 100,000
Number of sites: 75 locations worldwide including eight major offices and three data centers

Network Environment:
100,000 desktops
6,000 Windows servers

The Worm: Blaster

Threat Severity: Critical

Real Cost of Blaster Outbreak:
Activity
Cost
IT staff time
$25/hour/staff
Desktop patching, testing, and paperwork
One hour/desktop @ 100,000 desktops=$2.5M
Server patching, testing, and paperwork
30 hours/server @ 6,000 servers=$4.5M
Total Cost
Over $7 million
 

Additional Costs:
According to this organization, the calculation of $7 million is very conservative and does not include:

  • loss of productivity of IT staff
  • loss of productivity of end users
  • loss of revenues

Their Conclusion:
An investment into an internal security solution is required to contain such outbreaks, and is clearly justified by the damage and losses they sustained in the Blaster outbreak.

Their Solution:
Check Point InterSpect was designed specifically to block the spread of worms and attacks inside your network. By segmenting your network into security zones, InterSpect isolates attacks and infected machines and prevents the rest of your network from being compromised. With the increasing number of threats that are introduced within the network, companies need a solution that will prevent outages, downtime and lost revenue.
 
Learn more today:
View the InterSpect Flash Demo
Download a META Group White Paper: Securing Internal Networks
Download the InterSpect Datasheet