75% of respondents said their company was hit by cyber attacks last year.

According to the report, in a survey of 2,100 information technology executives around the world, 75% per cent said their company had been hit by cyber attacks last year, with most cyber attacks designed to steal corporate intellectual property, such as product design.

"We saw some companies go bankrupt because of intellectual property theft, so it's a matter of life and death in some ways," said Maureen Kelly, a senior corporate executive responsible for product marketing. ”

Symantec pointed out that the protection of enterprise data security is increasingly difficult, in order to deal with the global economic crisis, many companies to reduce security-responsible staff, while the hacker's technology is increasing. Last month, Google said it and at least 20 other companies had suffered a series of highly sophisticated cyber attacks. At least 100 companies have suffered similar cyber attacks over the past 18 months, according to a security expert who declined to be named.

Symantec says cyber attacks by hackers are also beginning to shift in the direction of stealing trade secrets.

"Hackers are still trying to steal personal data, such as information card information, and focus more on business espionage and disinformation," Kelly said. She said: "Hackers have become more and more professional, began to work together, a person responsible for network intrusion, the second person responsible for data acquisition, the third person responsible for the installation of software theft data, the fourth person responsible for data encoding and transmission." ”