Cyber security: pay now or pay later.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: On Colorado - Editorial

IF YOUR E-MAILS PILE UP LIKE MINE DO, YOU MUST, IF you are a small-business owner, be careful not to open or correspond with mails that might somehow infect your business.

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Dean Turner, who is editor of the twice-a-year Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, called me last month to tell me our readers, mostly small-business owners, have been identified in his report as particularly "vulnerable,"--"the third-most-targeted sector"--to Internet attacks by cyber cruisers seeking to commit fraud, identity theft or other cyber crime.

If Symantec were to include home computers and home-office computers with "small business" computers, said Turner, then those "small" users would far outnumber those in financial institutions and education, the sectors ranked above "small business" as the most vunerable to cyber attackers.

Sounds scary, and I guess it is.

ColoradoBiz writer Eric Peterson has written in the magazine about having his bank identity stolen through a "phishing" scam, and our latest quarterly tech report, in our April issue (look for the next one in July), was about the importance of securing your data.

Turner said Symantec was documenting the need for small businesses, with, say, 20 computers in house and an appropriate number of portable laptops, to provide firewalls, intrusion detectors, spam protectors and anti-virus protection not only at the "perimeters" of their systems, but even at the desktops, in order to keep their machines from being unknowingly recruited in some diabolical worldwide plot.

I'm serious. He said he couldn't talk specifically in dollar amounts but that a small business could take the appropriate precautions for under $40,000 if it had to keep its cyber-security budget lean.

I asked him why I should not consider his approach to me as merely a sales pitch...