Recently one of my clients was hit with the Vundo virus. This virus can most variants of Windows (Windows 2000, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows XP), however it is unknown if it can affect Windows Vista as of yet. This Trojan progam is a component of an adware program that downloads and displays pop-up advertisements. It is known to be installed by visiting a Web site link contained in a spammed email. The client who received this trojan program lost more than a day and a half of productivity due to this trojan program.

I am not going to go into great detail about this trojan program, but I will talk about the loss of productivity experienced because of the downtime trying to eradicate the issue. What are most organizations doing to ensure that they do not experience this type of downtime? Do they have active policies in place to make sure that they do not lose this much time? Should they re-exam the privileges they allow their workforce when using their workstations?

Most of the time these issues can be avoided, however, sometimes these types of problems just happen. Besides locking all system functionality and pulling these systems off the net, companies will be dealing with these issues forever. My fear is that most companies will not take this as seriously as they should unless they seriously think about the cost of downtime experienced because of a virus or trojan program. Luckily for this client the issue only effected one employee. How much would the impact be if this affected the whole organization? That's what companies and business owners should be thinking about...