New threats to America’s power grid are surfacing daily. The folks at McAfee  spend most of their waking hours looking for ways to defend their clients from the never ending barrage of cyber-threats.

On the other hand, non- geeks simply want a worry-free, hacker-free Internet experience and we generally don’t care about the details of the international day to day battle of tech wits.

However, some tech experts on the front lines are alarmed these days. They have known about the foreign threat for years, but they have come to realize something that is both disturbing and revealing about our own willingness to fight back.

Elan Winkler over at McAfee surveyed 200 critical infrastructure IT professionals and discovered an eye opening attitude. These industry insiders blame cost and complacency for our predicament. Winkler states:

“So, if the people in the know, knew, how come we’re still vulnerable? I asked them that question as well. The number one answer: cost. Number two: complacency. No real surprises there; those are the same answers that we used to get from IT departments 15 years ago on why they didn’t have defense in depth technologies set up to protect servers and databases.”

The survey respondents also provided the following comments:

• “There hasn’t been a real incident so no one takes it seriously.”
• “Lack of knowledge and understanding.”
• “Inability of decision makers to commit to security upgrades.”
• “No one wants to pay for security.”
• “False sense of security.”
• “Security competes with other priorities for resources.”
• “We, as Americans, believe we are invulnerable to this kind of attack.”

In neighborhoods across our great country,  most power outages are often simply a result of the forces of  Mother Nature. For example, a nasty December storm blew through our neighborhood just last night leaving about 700 homes in the dark, well into the night.

Imagine what could happen if our own complacency and budget constraints were to put the entire nation at risk.

Government’s job is to protect citizens from both foreign and domestic threats.  Our job is to support them in any way we can.

This pervasive, lazy attitude held by many inside the IT community, renders the term”computer geek” more laughable than it already is.

The New Year’s barrage arrives just days before President Obama is sworn in.

Today was unlike most days when I open my email, yawn and shrug my shoulders. This evening, my KEEN eye caught three names of email senders that I didn’t recognize. That generally means “junk or spam email, but today was different due to the sheer volume and ridiculously (laughable) transparency of these scammers.

These emails were online scams, so phony looking that anyone with “half-a-brain” could spot them a mile away. Three in one day! I had to look in a mirror to make sure the word “sucka” wasn’t pinned to my back.

Not only did the senders promise OUTRAGEOUS sums of money for my help, the spelllinngg was so bad that I actually laughed out loud.

Phishing scams come in many varieties including lottery scams, bill collector scams, fraud investigation scams, employment application scams, overseas bank transfer scams, credit card or banking verification scams and many  others.

According to the Yahoo Security Center:

“If you receive an email (or instant message) from someone you don’t know directing you to sign in to a web site, be careful! You may have received a phishing email with links to a phishing web site. A phishing web site (sometimes called a “spoofed” site) tries to steal your account password or other confidential information by tricking you into believing you’re on a legitimate web site. You can even land on a phishing site by mistyping a URL (web address).

Is that web site legitimate? Don’t be fooled by a site that looks real. It’s easy for phishers to create web sites that look like the genuine article, complete with the logos and other graphics of a trusted web site.”

Unfortunately, the current economic downturn is expected to cause a dramatic increase in the number and frequency of these fraudulent attempts to separate the uninformed from their personal data.

The good news is that these crimes are getting harder and harder to pull off, due to greater consumer awareness and more advanced spam filtering technologies.

Despite the almost comical transparency of the three scams that entered my email box today, the potential for harm and the growing frequency of these annoying ploys is really no laughing matter.