Worms are proving to be both a financial and managerial headache for Internet service providers.

Dealing with worms that travel over their networks could cost North American ISPs as much as $245m (£134m) in 2004, according to a study released on Wednesday by peer-to-peer management company Sandvine. For service providers worldwide, the overall expense could reach $370m. The totals include the cost of tactical-response teams, swamped customer support resources, higher transit costs, and probable customer churn due to a loss of positive brand image over time.

Sandvine estimated that, on any given day, between 2 percent and 12 percent of traffic on service provider networks is malicious. Even on networks with good security, malicious traffic accounts for 5 percent of all data.

By Dinesh C. Sharma at CNET.

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