Honestly, I agree with VMyths a great deal. Of course, it helps that I've long since grown sick and tired of mi2g's FUD - but there's no way that virus outbreaks cause that much in the way of problems.
In our organization - several tens of thousands of computers - we've got a tiered layers of ePolicy Orchestrator servers and SUS servers, so as soon as updates come out. We've had a few virus outbreaks, but they've been very limited (<10 computers hit) and very quickly contained.
The overall cost from each specific virus outbreak is minimal for us. How much does it cost for a sysadmin to open a management console and click through "download and apply latest DAT file"?
Quote:
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"Anecdotal evidence helps us to confirm the scale of the estimate - at the height of the MyDoom attack, one large London firm we know had to close down their offices for a couple of days as they were being continually swamped by virus carrying emails, undeliverable notifications and virus alert messages."
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Does it really take that much bandwidth to set up a mail server filter to drop mails with certain attributes? I doubt it happened exactly like that, or else their SA's were being highly paranoid. Granted, our organization has a SONET line, but we've never come close to having a measurable percentage of bandwidth consumed by viruses/worms/etc..