Cost of Sasser is $500m and counting…

The cost of the Sasser virus to business worldwide is thought to be as much as $500m - and that's before the latest version version of the worm (Sasser.f) has really got going, according to consulting firm Computer Economics.

It doesn't look like being a good year. According to security experts McAfee, there has been more virus activity this year already than in all of last year.

Jack Clark, security expert at McAfee, said: "The Sasser worm is just the latest in a string of viruses with multiple variants. For the first time, the letters of the alphabet have been exhausted and variants are being labelled Bagle.ab and so on."

And Clark estimates that the bill for the MyDoom virus will have hit $4bn by the end of the year.

The first Sasser worm popped up on May Day and only a couple of days ago the over-optimistic amongst us breathed a sigh of relief when German police, aided by Bill Gates' mass of cash, ran in the 17 year old who had written the original version.

But, too soon, other versions and copycats appeared. One later variant urged sufferers to apply their Microsoft patches and avoid the problem. We're now up to version six, or 'f' as it's known. And it's only been twelve days.

The altruistic little malware writer has one thing right – get those patches on and let somebody else pay for shooting the bill over $500m.