My little network is protected better than most major web sites. I have a gateway, firewall and IDS running. I get probes and attacks daily. My IDS does an immediate back trace on the probe, and that scares away most of them. You see most of the hackers have IDS systems going too.
Most hackers have far better security on their home systems the mainframes they are targeting.
Three real important things to remember. Always remember that the Internet was designed to freely exchange information. All of the underlying structure was built with the goal of making it easy to find and retrieve data. Now we come along and are trying to add security to it. It was not designed with security in mind, so all that security is pasted on top, so to speak.