Andrew Kantor was the editor of Tech Decisions inSeptember of 2001. The day after the attacks of 9/11, he wrotea column that reflected the anger many felt after watching theWorld Trade Center towers collapse.

“By the time you read this, I hope, we will have responded tothe attacks against us with an unprecedented show of force—one thatwill shock the world to the same degree that yesterday'sdestruction did,” wrote Kantor. “I want the world to say, 'I didn'tthink America was capable of that.' I want historians to debate in50 years whether we did too much.”

What was different then from now is Kantor's words—thoughwritten 24 hours after the attack—were published in the Octoberedition of Tech Decisions, some three weeks after theattacks took place. There was no blog on our Website as there istoday. The world had yet to discover Twitter.

While looking back on the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, Iexamined some past issues of our magazine. Other than Kantor'sangry words, I was surprised there wasn't much written in our pageson the event. But in December 2001, we did publish an article titled “How the Internet Is Damagingthe Insurance Industry” written by a guest columnist named JohnAshenhurst.

The headline alone tells us, in retrospect, his words weremisguided. Ashenhurst listed three problems with the Internet: whathe called the certain failure of the Internet, the misuse ofcapital that was no longer being spent on other technologysolutions, and the overselling of remote Web services.

At the time, Ashenhurst didn't believe the Internet was secureenough to develop into the business model it eventually became. Hemight have based that viewpoint on the events of 9/11. If you werein your office that day and heard the news, you probably went toCNN.com or some other Website as many of us did only to discover aslow, unresponsive Internet that couldn't handle the millions ofvisitors that craved information.

Our sister publication, the National Underwriter rushedto get the story . . . in print. It would be a few years beforeNU or Tech Decisions would have the capability ofreporting immediately upon an event to its online audience.

Our Website back then was designed to publish last month's issueof the print magazine—we wanted to make sure all our magazinesubscribers got a chance to view the magazine before posting thearticles online. Today it's pretty much the other way around.

The Internet has hardly damaged the insurance industry. Instead,it has changed the way people do business. Resistance has beenfutile.

Security remains an issue—even more so today than a decade ago.Yes, the Internet conceivably could fail, as Ashenhurst predicted:“The industry becomes more dependent on the Internet daily, yet theInternet is likely to fail in ways we can't yet imagine.”

Well, people did imagine that it could fail, but it hasn'thappened yet, in part because of what happened 10 years ago thisSunday. If 9/11 did anything for this country it was to renew oursecurity measures. Had terrorists attacked the Internet in 2001, itwould have been a major inconvenience, but it would not havecrippled our economy. Today, it would seem like the world stopped.

Is there an evil genius out there ready to take it down in 2011,I suppose there could be, but it seems more likely that such ahacker would attack a single company rather than the entire WorldWide Web.

Still, vigilance is demanded by all of us in everything wedo—not just the Internet. Our lives have changed in the lastdecade. We are no longer naïve about the hatred our enemies havefor us today. That should keep us all on our toes for decades tocome.