Hackers are the new Lawyers are the new Knights.

Back in the feudal days, Lords had Knights to protect them and their possessions from enemies (or to attack their neighbors and plunder their wealth).

In the business world today, lawyers are much like the knights of old. Companies can attack each other with the law, and lawyers are both the attacker and defenders.

In the increasingly computerized world, business are hacking each other to steal their Intellectual Property, understand their strategy, and sometimes, take them down all together (like what happened to HBGary, though that wasn't caused by another company). Today, these tactics are employed mostly by Chinese companies hacking competitors in other countries, but as multinational corporations continue to grow in power, this tactic might become more ubiquitous. Imagine a world where corporations grow more powerful than governments... cyber attacks might become as common as legal attacks, if there is no government with enough power to catch them or stop them.

In today's world, and very likely even more so in the future, business that have no cyber-firepower will be analogous to peaceful farming villages in the feudal days who had no military capacity, just waiting to be attacked by their militarily superior neighbors.