According to a recent report released by Verizon Communications, electronic security breaches last year surpassed the collective past four-year figures, with the financial sector depicting the highest rise in attacks - its share of attacks increased two times to 30 percent - from hackers looking for big hoardings of consumer data.

Verizon also said that the retail sector, which was another `favorite target' of the hackers, accounted for on-third of the total hacking cases last year.

With reference to the cases that Verizon's business security experts handled, the report said the financial sector held 93 percent of the 285 million individual records - like account personal identification numbers (PIN) - that were compromised in the 2008 hacks. Upon analyzing the 90 different data breaches, Verizon found that hacking has become increasingly `sophisticated.'

While earlier the data thieves targeted smaller companies with weaker security and launched numerous attacks; they now aim for companies and organizations with huge records, to earn more money by selling records on the black market.

Commenting on the newest modus-operandi of the hackers, Wade Baker, a Verizon Business Security Solutions' research executive, said: "In 2008 the criminals have really done something different. Instead of hitting small one-off shops for small hauls of data, we saw them targeting large companies with a great deal of data."