Spyware Costs Businesses More Than $8,000 a Year

Spyware on corporate computers causes serious network downtime at more than one-quarter of small and midsize businesses (SMBs), with each incident costing an average of 2.5 days to resolve. A computer-technology association counsels CIOs to look at spyware as a serious business issue rather than a technology issue, and make safe-computing education a C-level initiative.

The Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), which offers IT training and certifications, researched the impact that spyware has on SMBs, which it defines as firms with 10-200 PC users.

More than 25 percent of end users reported their productivity was affected by a spyware infection (everything from pop-up windows to major data-breach threats) in the last six months, and more than a third of those users had been infected multiple times. Some of them were infected 10 times or more in that period.