According to researchers at Symantec, the health care sector has become the hot target for hackers in recent months.

The cybersecurity company says it's also seeing big increases in "spear-phishing," "ransomware" and efforts to exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities in software used by a wide range of industries.

Robert Shaker, a Symantec official, notes that almost 80 percent of the calls to Symantec's global "incident response" service since December have come from health organizations.

The hackers are usually seeking info on patients and employee data.

Shaker said the he thinks the next area of attack may be higher education that historically is less focused on computer security. The nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse says the University of Maryland, North Dakota University and Butler University in Indianapolis have disclosed that hackers obtained personal identifying information for hundreds of thousands of students.

Author and security expert Marc Goodman said that hackers are increasingly using automated software that spams companies or repeatedly probes their networks for vulnerabilities.

Particularly disturbing is that almost 9 million incidents of "ransomware" attacks were carried out last year, more than double the total from 2013.

Just as companies are sharing info on attacks, the hackers are sharing info amongst themselves as well.

Source: ecnmag.com