So far this year, we've already seen computers around the world, at homes, at campuses, and at businesses being commandeered—unbeknownst to their owners—for use in Distributed Denial of Service attacks against corporate giants like CNBC, E-Trade, and Yahoo.

As a computer user, it's important to remember that computer security is still an afterthought in many applications, not a core piece. For example, disk array designers are primarily concerned that the products have large storage capacities and are network manageable. Secure connections to the disks are often secondary. Similarly, Web-based interfaces let users easily manage the hardware and software products popping up everywhere, but very few of them are Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) capable. We're using great tools, but they're increasing the security risk, not decreasing it.

If you can't expect applications to be secure, then what about the operating systems that they run on? Most desktop operating systems, like NT and MacOS, weren't designed to properly protect against Internet attack. These operating systems were designed as single-user environments, with no concept of security—for neither the data, nor the core operating system—and thus rely on supplemental programs to handle security.

Seeing as neither the applications nor the operating systems are secure enough, it's up to end users to take steps to protect their computers.<>
  Day of Defeat Online Gaming

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