I see a lot of posts about how to protect your precious computer, but what is it that we are trying to protect?

*Note: Before you flame me, I'm not trying to ask a stupid question. I just see many not knowing what it is that the full consequences can be of not protecting your computer* 

*On with the question...*

What threats out there is it that we have to protect ourselves from? Spyware that would steal our credit-card information, our social security number or something else? These things are at risk even if we built ourselves a fortress at home. Especially in the light of the recent Equifax breach (these breaches seems to happen all the time), it hard to see how we could avoid losing sensitive data just by securing our home computers.

Dont get me wrong, I fully understand why we would want to protect our servers, business computers and other business-sensitive hardware & software. I'm all for enhanced security and best practices here. But the home computers I think is quite a different story.

For many people, most of our data is saved online, in the hands of cloud-services. Services that have rollbacks and the possibility to restore the individual files to a previous version. Even if my entire computer and my cloud-data was encrypted from some kind of ransomware, I would be able to just roll back to a previous version of either the computer or in the cloud select a previous version of my files.

Are we instead primarily speaking of securing that my computer does not end up in some kind of a bot-net? Making sure that my device is not used to hurt others? In that case, I think our personal computers are the least problem? We are seeing more and more IoT attacks with our intelligent toasters trying to DDOS someone.

Bottomline, what is it that we want to defend ourselves from? What is the case for the person who remembers to take a backup up his data?