These pesky items are very often the little guys that sneak in through the open door at the back of the mansion and open the main doors to let the enemy come in an ransack the building (metaphorically speaking).

But most users don't understand the actions they did that allowed that to happen. That innocent looking email attachment, using your USB stick in infected computer and then transfering the infection to every machine you come into contact with! These things are often how disasters start.

Several ways of doing this, depending on your level of parnoia, but you might want to consider:

• Encryption
• Controlling physical access.
• Auditing access to data and reviewing it.
• Having a proficient backup strategy.

It's important to teach all users how to protect their login credentials. Even after using this method of authentication for many years, most users still have no solid way to secure their login credentials.

Surveys tell us that 95% of users have absolutely no idea how to choose an effective password and they have no strategy to remember or record high quality passwords.

This is probably one of the most important lessons we can teach people today. Most serious security breaches are due to compromised passwords, because the users had never been taught how to handle their passwords properly.

So your PC hard disk is encrypted 256bit encryption and you can only logon with your twelve character password made up of completely random characters, including upper and lowercase, symbols and numerals, which you have recorded only in your head, but what happens when you press send on an email, perhaps laden with attachments detailing your companies most intimate secrets?

In most cases, this date then leaves the relative safety of your internal network, without so much as changing it's slippers and grabbing a coat. It travels halfway around the world, through many different friendly and not so friendly countries, across networks where anyone with access can record the contents of your email for viewing later at their leisure before sending on a copy to your adversaries. Ten seconds later, you boss calls from the other side of your wall, to say, "Thanks, I got it.".

Who would ever suspect that that ten second journey could have been fraught with so much danger? But it's journeys like these that often spell the end of companies.

We can no longer consider it responsible to send a message in plaintext, outside of our own networks and the time will soon be here, when it won't be responsible to do so on internal networks either.

It's time that each one of us took the trouble to become familiar with how to encrypt the emails we send to protect ourselves, our recipients and even our families and businesses.

How bad will you feel, if it's your email which brings the company down?