I've been trying different internet security programs for about six months now, after it became clear that my Norton suite was creating significant problems on the computers I had it installed on.

You might want to know that I ended up by ZoneAlarm. It was one of two top candidates that included Trend Micro. ZoneAlarm has a nice, simple interface and a variety of nice features that recognizes when you are in a safe zone (your home or business network) and when you aren't. Yet the real reason I bought it was that it was on sale at the CompUSA closeout sale.

Ultimately, its become apparent to me that quibbling about whether this product or that product is better is besides the point and this seems as good a metaphor for the issue as any I've seen.

"You can't always improve the security of something by doing it better," Tippett said. "If we made seatbelts out of titanium instead of nylon, they'd be a lot stronger. But there's no evidence to suggest that they'd really help improve passenger safety."

The incidence of new virus variants has increased 5 times in 2007 over 2006 and there is no reason to believe that won't continue to happen. This isn't a bunch of computer science geeks anymore either, but well-organized criminal networks benefiting from a statistical approach to breaching computer security.

But if a hacker breaks into the password files of a corporation with 10,000 machines, he only needs to guess one password to penetrate the network, Tippett notes. "In that case, the long passwords might mean that he can only crack 2,000 of the passwords instead of 5,000," he said. "But what did you really gain by implementing them? He only needed one."

Iraq had demonstrated that terrorists are relentlessly imaginative in adjusting their tactics to every new response by coalition and Iraqi troops. For computers, multiply the incidence of such adaptations by millions of times.

The rate of penetration has also grown. Virus-checking software failed to stop some of the newer, untraditional malicious software 30% of the time. New malware is increasingly coming in pieces, essentially compiling itself on our computers to download other pieces one at the time.

Seatbelts don't always save your life either, but its still a good idea to use them, but increasingly its going to be up to users to practice safe-computing.