Mother nature
Every company has innate resistance to hacking. I'm not talking about firewalls and tracers and all this other stuff we've bought, just basic things that make low risk companies hard targets.

Go ahead, sue me
I admit I lied above. There are no sophisticated industrial spies. Any company that does business in the U.S. knows that this country has more lawyers than the number of stars in the Milky Way. Mere possession of a hacked password is considered stolen property. Bragging that you've stolen your competitor's latest widget design isn't going to be much consolation when your cellmate brags about how many people he's killed.

In addition, companies have been able to sue their competitors for lost revenues that were gained by information acquired illegally. Top that off with attorney fees, and you're left with the conclusion that any company that is so self-destructive or horribly mismanaged to promote industrial spying isn't going to be around very long. A quick look at hacking Web sites confirms this. Most mention that they don't condone hacking. This may only be lip service, but they're doing it out of fear of being sued for acting as a source for illegal activity.

We need a bigger boat
Imagine the worst-case scenario. Your competitor is able to intercept every single email sent in your company. All your secrets are in their possession! Now think for a minute about what they're going to do with it. For some reason, people assume that once their security is breached, the intruder is shown a golden door to all the most valuable information. I can barely find important files on my own computer. How is someone who doesn't know your company going to be able to sift through all those gigabytes of data and gain anything? Intercepting every email would require a warehouse of storage devices and a department of trained people to search through it all-bypassing the baby pictures and wedding invitations.

When the CIA were tapping phone lines in East Berlin, they had to be careful not to disrupt the world's supply of magnetic tapes because they were buying so much; and that only went on for about eight months or so. The sheer size of your network and Notes environment is one of your biggest security advantages. The enemy would have to have a network of the same size just to hold all your data.

Widget Inc. who?
Again, if you're a low risk company, no one cares about you. If you're a small company, your competitors won't have the time or resources to try and hack you. If you're a big company, you can sue the pants off any punk who bothers you. Most importantly, though, you're boring. I just did a random flip through the yellow pages to find a low risk company. I landed on a personal injury attorney. As a hacker, yes, I may find some of his cases interesting. That is, if I could hack in, and I could find the cases in all his data. Given those big ifs, what's the harm? It's unlikely the hacker is the plaintiff in any given case. It's also unlikely that the information will be disseminated because, again, who cares?