It's not even close. It never has been, and ESchlangen is far from the first person to come up with the boneheaded idea that a house is the same thing as a computer system. He certainly won't be the last, either, as ignorance is the only thing more pervasive and harder to kill than cockroaches.

Let's play with your building analogy. Let's say that you have data on me (my bank, my credit card companies, etc.) or have data that I paid for as a taxpayer. Now let's say that you keep this in an unlocked file cabinet in a building with the front door unlocked. Now let's say that some passerby (we'll call her Alice) jiggles the door handle and finds out it's unlocked. When Alice walks through that door and takes my file out of the cabinet, I'm going to be pretty mad at her, but it's Bob--the moron who left the door open--whose head I'm going to go after. Alice wouldn't be charging up my credit cards if Bob had a clue. Yet in your world, Bob is somehow the victim. I'm not defending Alice, but Bob has committed contributory negligence here.

"There is no love lost with any Network Admin or Network Engineer that has had an intrusion and was left to deal with the reprocussions, loss and possibly damage to data."

Waahhh! I didn't do the job I AM PAID TO DO and now my laziness and/or incompetence has turned out to have real world consequences. Why can't I just sit here with my finger up my nose and draw a paycheck every week? This security stuff is hard. Waahhh.

That's why security experts and competent admins are *professionals*, not chair-filling wastes of a perfectly good FTE. As a manager, you of all people should demand that the people in your department be doing their job. Their performance is a reflection upon you. But in your case, I suppose that only applies when they do well, right? When they screw the pooch, that's their own problem and naturally nothing you had anything to do with. Or, according to your line of thinking, it's not even their fault; it's the fault of someone who came along and showed them why network administration isn't something you can just do in one day and then take the rest of your career off.

Unfortunately, there are too many "immature" little boys and girls out there that still believe they should be allowed to collect a paycheck without having to do their job... Maybe some reality checks will help them GROW UP and act responsibly.