The old saying of "you get what you pay for" seems to be well directed when it comes to this topic. If you're willing to allocate $100K more than you currently spend to mitigating the effects from Worms and Viruses, I'm sure you will have some increased success. If you allocate 1 mill more, your success will increase substantially. The true cost really boils down to what you are trying to protect, such as how many servers, users, network segments, and other critical devices you are willing to encompass in your protection plan. Also, you may be able to mitigate the cost by using the functionality built into devices you may already own. A good protection schema needs to address the use and benefits from the following: Firewalls, VPN tunnels and policies, HIDs, NIDs, Antivirus software, and a good network security policy that grows with your network. You may already have most of this in place and need only a little extra funding allocated to give you the protection level you feel comfortable with. If you're looking for pricing on each component, they will vary widely depending on the brand and model you go with. You should shop around for components that suit your budget. An example of this price variance can be found by looking at a Net Forensics project priced at $500k compared to a similar solution going will Network Intelligence at $40K. The Network Intelligence solution may not have all the functionality offered by Net Forensics, but it may be enough for your needs. Best of luck in fighting this ever growing problem, Mike Braun -----Original Message----- From: sgorman1@gmu.edu [mailto:sgorman1@gmu.edu] Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 7:59 AM To: Joel Jaeggli Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Cost of Worm Attack Protection Good point - then what is the cost of attempting to mitigate or handle attacks vs. doing nothing? ----- Original Message ----- From: Joel Jaeggli <joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu> Date: Thursday, November 13, 2003 10:14 am Subject: Re: Cost of Worm Attack Protection
I haven't seen any network or customer site that has protected itself from worms... only mitigated them.
joelja
On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 sgorman1@gmu.edu wrote:
I was hoping to get some estimates from folks on the costs of
defending> networks from various worm attacks. It is a pretty wide open question,
but if anyone has some rough estimates of what it costs per edge, manpower vs. equipment costs, or any combination thereof it would be of great assistance. We are doing some simulations of attack and defense> strategies and looking for some good metrics to plug into a cost benefit model. We'd be happy to share the results if anyone is interested as well.
Thanks in advance,
sean
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------- ------- Joel Jaeggli Unix Consulting joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu GPG Key Fingerprint: 5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2
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