The Security Mentor

Executive summary: humans are lousy at figuring out what's more dangerous and more worthy of protective efforts.

My favorite security guru, Bruce Schneier, quotes Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert about disk perception.

The most important point for computer security is the first one, "We over-react to intentional actions, and under-react to accidents, abstract events, and natural phenomena". Whether you lose all your files to a system crash or to a destructive program, you're just as hurt and need to do the same things to recover (hint: do you have recent backups?). Destructive viruses are rare these days and system crashes are all too common. I advise my clients to prepare for natural disasters before they prepare for terrorist attacks.