CORRECTION: ITWeb Africa initially reported that Kenya had a 91% cyber crime attack rate, however, the Kaspersky report actually refers to a worldwide rate.

Cyber crime is said to be ‘surging’ worldwide as 91% of organisations have suffered at least one attack in the past 12 months, according to a survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International.

The survey has further revealed that 9% of the same companies were victims of planned activities aimed at infecting the network infrastructure of specific organisations.

The survey has gone on to associate the ‘increase’ in cyber attacks to the growing use of digital services in the East African country.

“The extensive use of digital devices in business has created ideal conditions for cyber-espionage and the deployment of malware capable of stealing corporate data,” says the report.

"The potential is so great that malicious programmes may soon completely replace company insiders as the way of gathering information,” stated an extract from the report.

The survey has also indicated that the year 2013 saw a major disclosure about spyware-led attacks that were related, directly or indirectly, to the activities of various government agencies.

It was established that other significant actors on the corporate cyber threat scene have included businesses that turned to cyber criminals to penetrate their competitors’ networks.

The main corporate findings of the survey included the identification of spyware-led attacks that related to various governments.

The survey also established that most cyber criminal incidents were aimed at stealing information.

Sabotage by way of using malicious programmes to wipe data or block infrastructure operations has also been listed among the operations of the cybercriminals.

“Some special Trojan programs were capable of stealing money via online banking systems. Cybercriminals could also compromise corporate sites and redirect visitors to malicious resources, damaging a company’s reputation,” said the survey.

It was revealed that cybercriminals were continuously improving their malware by use of unconventional approaches and solutions from encryptors and shredders.