Stupid security mistakes: Things you missed while doing the hard stuff

If you're worried about high-tech hackers using advanced and sinister techniques to break through your fancy firewalls -- well, that's not outside the realm of possibility. By all means, spend money on firewalls! But you might also want to keep in mind some distinctly low-tech security problems that are not particularly sophisticated -- in fact, some might call them distinctly dumb -- that nevertheless mean bad things for the companies or people who suffer them.

We live in an increasingly virtual world, where our crucial data lives on the cloud and we live in fear of electronic intrusions into our particular fiefdom in cyberspace. But it does pay to remember that all of that data does, ultimately, reside on metal-and-plastic computers that do occupy real space in the physical universe. These computers can be touched, picked up, and carried away, and that's bad news. For instance, NASA has suffered a number of recent cybersecurity scandals, among them the fact that 48 of the agency's laptops and phones were just straight-up stolen.