Internet and network security must provide us with integrity, confidentiality, privacy, freedom to transact commerce and availability of data. In order to ensure we have all of these things we must use tools such as anti-virus and be vigilant of suspicious web sites and emails. Your web presence is reflective of yourself and thus must be treated as such. Your computer is like your house that you live in online. You must protect it from robbers who can steal things such as your identity, your money, or even use your house for their own personal gains such as using it to send spam and delivering viruses to your friends, family, and other unsuspecting Internet inhabitants.

There are now many forms of online attacks. Murder may not be possible yet, but there's an unconfirmed report that when the worms cut down the Internet back in 2003, a cyber-racket in South Korea that regularly demanded protection money from Internet cafe operators was extremely upset that they did not get the usual money from an operator. So people were sent out to kill that operator. Frequently I see on CNN or other news agencies reports of horrible crimes either originating from online taunting or having some sort of cyber-connection.

The greatest threats to today's networks are driven by the fueled by the desire of attaining ill-gotten gains. For chief information officers or CIOs, the point isn't why their network hasn't been attacked yet, it's why the potential hackers have not yet figured out how to get money out of the network. We have seen time and time again enterprise networks being compromised and Internet criminals making out with bounties of credit card information, financial information and other sensitive data which was supposedly secure information.

Hacking is and will continue to be a lucrative profession as long as security professionals at organizations that house sensitive information lag behind the skills of the cyber-criminals.
There are however several resources that one can embrace to help keep themselves up to date on current threats, including Cisco's Security Center, Symantec's Industry Analyst Reports and McAfee's Threat Center.

I encourage you to read the fine print on the security and privacy policies of the enterprises and organizations networks and web sites that you use.

Safe surfing.