In the the University of Bedfordshire crunched data on incidents reported to forensics firm 7Safe, finding that the overwhelming majority came from external sources.

Of the 62 breaches 7Safe was called in to investigate across a range of sectors, 80 percent were found to be external in origin, 18 percent came from business partners, leaving only 2 percent to be blamed on insiders.

Sixty-nine percent of these happened in the retail sector, mainly in online commerce, leaving finance in its wake with 7 percent, IT and services with 4 percent, and councils with 2 percent.

In 85 percent of the cases, 7Safe found that the compromised information was payment and card data, and the main attack route was through the sort of unsophisticated SQL injection attacks databases are supposed to be able to resist. Shared hosting was a common theme, whereby an attacker undermines one website and uses the same vulnerability to attack others on the same host.

"A lot of them are not particularly sophisticated attacks," reinforces 7Safe co-founder and CEO, Alan Phillips. "It is just poor coding of these websites."