The F-Secure blog says that the website for the new War of the Worlds movie has been defaced. This is one of many ways that the movie studios will advertise the movie. Let’s estimate the losses:
- The value of the website’s contribution to advertising the movie must be worth at least as much as was spent on it. To figure out a ‘daily value’ minimum, take the cost of the website and divide by the number of days between the day the website was launched and the day where the website loses its usefulness (for practical purposes). This may be, for example, a point six weeks after the movie is released. The daily cost may be divided further to get an hourly rate, then multiplied by the time the website was down.
- Add in incident costs associated with the manpower required to restore the site and fix any code.
I am assuming there is no revenue generation capability (that sells t-shirts, for example) else that should be factored in as well. Also, I assume that nothing else was stolen/copied or modified.