IP: RE: A report on the WHite House meeting by Gene Stafford

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> From: "David Newman" <dnewman () networktest com>
> To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
> Cc: <spaf () cerias purdue edu>
>
>
> > One estimate in one news source speculated
> > that over
> > > a billion dollars had been lost in lost revenue, downtime, and
> > > preventative measures.  I'm skeptical of that, but it certainly is the
> > > case that a significant loss occurred.
>
> I'm very skeptical of that figure too. One possible way to gauge the costs
> is to take the most recently quarterly revenue of the attacked companies;
> divide by the number of hours in a quarter; and multiply by the number of
> hours they were off the air.
>
> Not claiming this is anything but a rough estimation (or even a valid way to
> figure it), but if we do use this method for six big victims -- Amazon,
> Buy.com, E*trade, eBay, Yahoo!, and ZDnet -- the total outage resulted less
> than $1 million, with an M, in lost revenue. And some of these folks (like
> ZDnet) have non-Internet revenue, so the actual loss may be lower.
>
> It may be possible to tilt the scales the other way by noting that online
> brokerage Datek was hit. Their revenue figures are private, but the numbers
> might be larger than any of these. I rather doubt they lost $1 billion in an
> afternoon, though.
>
> Thanks to Techweb's Mo Krochmal for pointing out this very easy way to
> figure loss.
>
> David Newman
> Network Test