Manchester City Council pays $2.4m in Conficker clean up costs

From ZDNet Blogs

How severe can the impact of the Conficker worm be on a single city council that has apparently not implemented basic security solutions in place?

Pretty severe according to a recently released a report entitled “Service interruption resulting from ICT disruption in February 2009” which details the financial costs of a Conficker incident affecting Manchester City Council’s network - 1.5 million pounds in clean up costs and lost revenue from the downtime.

This organisation did not have security in place that would have mitigated the attack. And cleaning up after an attack is always a lot more expensive that preventing the attack. The message is clear - being proactive is cheaper than being reactive.