Numerous multinational energy companies have been targeted by hackers who have been focusing on financial documents related to oil and gas field exploration, bidding contracts, and drilling rights, as well as proprietary industrial process documents, according to a new McAfee report.

"It ... speaks to quite a sad state of our critical infrastructure security. These were not sophisticated attacks ... yet they were very successful in achieving their goals," said Dmitri Alperovitch, McAfee's vice president for threat research.

Apparently, the attacks can be traced back over several years, creating a sustained security compromise that has provided access to highly sensitive information that is of huge financial value to competitors.

The value of IRM as an additional layer of protection is clear. Whether your infrastructure security is in a sad state or is state of the art, breaches are always a possibility - and in any case, a lot of sensitive information is shared with third parties whose infrastructure security might not be as good as yours. IRM protects the individual information assets directly so that, even if infrastructure security is compromised, your critical information is enrypted and trackable and only accessible to authenticated, authorised, audited users.

The full McAfee report is available here.