77 percent of companies cannot respond to cyber attacks

The report features key findings from partners including Lockheed Martin and the Center for Internet Security and pulling information from 24 security operations centres, seven R&D centres, 3,5 trillion logs, 6,2 billion attacks and nearly 8,000 security clients across six continents.

In terms of the types of attacks, spear phishing accounted for 17% of incident response activities, with the attacks targeting executives and finance personnel in many cases. The volume of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks fell by 39% compared to 2014 and all of the top 10 vulnerabilities targeted by exploit kits during 2015 were related to Adobe Flash. Furthermore, the number of publicised Flash vulnerabilities jumped by a massive 312% from 2014.

There is also bad news for the retail sector, which experienced the most attacks per client in 2015, despite the finance sector being hit by the highest volume of attacks overall. The hospitality, leisure and entertainment sector came in second, followed by insurance, government and manufacturing.