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
>
>
>