Remain watchful!

People can be so ignorant and arrogant.  They assume that because they do not know something exists, then it does not.  A tricky statement, but very true.  This happened in the book The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll.  The people in the book refused to learn about the existence of computer insecurity, and so they assumed it just didn't exist.  To those who did learn to believe, most of them assumed nothing bad would ever happen to them.  I like to sit back and laugh at how foolish they were, but at the same time, I fall victim to the very same thing.  I assume that bad things won't happen to me, and so I'm often not prepared or I haven't taken the necessary precautions to protect myself from harm.  Sometimes it is monetarily or time expensive to do so, and so these people in the book who were the victims of the hacks were justified in their course of action until disaster hit. Now suddenly the disaster has hit, and all of a sudden it is a lot more expensive to fix the damage than it would have been to prevent it from ever happening.  While we as humans see this all the time--and it happens to us a lot individually--we still sometimes fail to grasp this concept of being prepared. Don't waste too many hours protecting yourself from hackings and other such attacks.  The author spent too much time chasing down this hacker, and while the ends may have justified the means, he almost lost his job, his relationship with his girlfriend, and the many other things that should be more prominent in our lives.  We need to look out for ourselves, always keeping one eye looking forward and one eye looking back.  We must always remain wary.