The claim comes in the wake of McAfee's just-published report claiming that cybercriminals are now focusing on intellectual property as a means of extracting revenues from businesses.
The report, says Anthony Haywood, Idappcom's CTO, confirms his research team's analysis of IP traffic threats over the last 24 months, which has tracked a marked shift to hybrid or advanced threats, where industrial espionage – and even business blackmail – is the order of the cybercriminal day.
"What we are seeing is something of a seismic shift away from conventional bank phishing for bank and card account credentials, over to a more sophisticated form of theft", he said.
Haywood went on to say that a time compression of the evolution of cybercrime is continuing, meaning that next year's cybercriminals will have almost certainly have developed even more advanced strategies to extract money from businesses.
Against this backdrop, Haywood argues that today's IT security defences need to be enhanced to protect against an increasing hybridised and multi-vectored set of security threats.
Interestingly, he says this does not always require the installation of shiny new IT security systems, and so allows firms to refine their existing IT security systems, augmenting them, rather than starting afresh.
This means, he adds, that security is not a set-it-and-forget-it installation, and that the need to constantly review a company's security posture – and enhance when necessary – should always be at the forefront of the savvy IT managers' mind.