Who can forget the likes of Lon Chaney, Bella Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, and Alfred Hitchcock - the godfathers of modern day horror and suspense films? These actors and directors were experts at building the kind of suspense that kept you on the edge of your seat, or covering your eyes. One almost couldn't help yelling at the femme fatale: "turn on the lights!", "look in the backseat!", "don't go in there!!!" And yet, of course, she never turns on the lights or looks in the backseat and - yes - she always does "go in there".

A recent film, "Untraceable", merges the suspense of old time horror with the modern twist of cybercrime. Nostalgically, the femme fatale in Untraceable, Jennifer Marsh (played by actress Diane Lane), never turns on lights, never locks doors behind her, and never checks the backseat. She also, stupidly, has the computer her daughter uses hooked up to the same network she uses for her for her own FBI laptop. So when daughter Annie (played by the adorable Perla Haney-Jardine) is socially engineered into downloading a backdoor Trojan, the backdoor easily gains access to mom's work files.

These all too human errors, so reminscent of the old-style horror film, are bolstered by an (admittedly 'cinematized') accuracy for the types of challenges faced by security researchers today: dynamic IPs mask the physical location of the bad guy's 'killwithme?' site; Web 2.0 and viral marketing hasten the death of the victims; and - of course - the kid's computer unravels the security of the home network.

While thankfully we aren't dealing with online murder of kittens and human beings, we do deal daily with the online massacre of people's credit scores, finances, and corporate confidential information. So remember, lock your doors, turn on the lights, check the backseat, keep your kids on a separate router, and for gosh sake - use ScanSafe.