Our civic duty as Internet citizens

If you have a computer that is connected to the Internet, isn't it your responsibility in today's age of cyber crime to make sure it is secure?  I concede that the age of script kiddies attacking individual PCs seems to be over.  Today's attacks are more and more narrow in scope, targeted at organizations that will make the attack profitable.  But even if you are not a victim of a targeted attack, you could be an unwitting accomplice in the targeted attacks.  If your computer has been infected with a bot and has been made a part of a bot farm, then you are part of the problem.  If you do not take steps in making sure you are secure, then you are contributing to the insecurity of the Internet as a whole.

So if an individual should be thus responsible, how much more should an organization be responsible?  The reason I ask is because I run across many companies that say that security is not a priority for them because they have never had an incident.  They are small to medium-sized companies that don't really have a lot of intellectual property, financial data, or customer data that the bad guys would be after (or so they think), so they don't see any use in buying into security.  This is the E-PIT-O-ME of irresponsibility, but the limited vision of some people and their concern with nothing but the bottom dollar is contributing to the problem.  So many companies and organizations do their civic duty in the physical community by sponsoring little league baseball teams, contributing to charities, etc.  But they either don't know or don't care that they owe that same responsibility to the cyber community ("cyber community" sounds a bit corny, but oh well).

In fact, I ran across two companies like this just today.  One fully admitted to not being worried about security.  The other knew it was needed, but he was new to the job, and he was pretty sure it would be difficult to sell security to his management.  Man, I so wanted to tell them that there how irresponsible they were being and how they were contributing to the insecurity of the Internet.  I would love to get a shot at scanning the computers and servers on networks and showing them how many bot-infected computers they have.  These people have been p0wned, and they don't even know it.  And they don't realize the impact they are having.