The public sector has become the prime target for malware attacks in the UK, with 40% of all malware attacks targeting this sector in 2014.
Nearly 13% of all the attacks were targeted towards the insurance sector, while 9% targeted both the finance and media sector in the country.
The revelation was made by NTT Com Security’s 2015 Global Threat Intelligence Report (GTIR), after analysing six billion security attacks in 2014.
The report also revealed that financial services were the prime target of attackers across the globe with 18% of all detected attacks directed towards the sector, followed by business and professional services organisations which accounted for 15% of all attacks.
Business and professional services organisations are connected to high value organisations, which makes them vulnerable to attacks, in the UK this sector represents 6% of all malware attacks.
According to GTIR global statistics, 76% of the vulnerabilities found across the systems in the organisations were more than 2 years old and 95% out of them were even 10 years old.
Despite occurrence of such incidents, 74% of the organisations had no incident response plan in place last year.
NTT Com Security Global Product Marketing senior director Stuart Reed said: "The fact that public sector figures are so high compared to other sectors in the UK is due largely to the value of the data that many of these organisations have, which makes them attractive and highly prised targets for malware attacks.
"While the level of threat may vary from organisation to organisation, they all have information that would be of interest to cyber criminals."
