Every Company Big Enough Already Hacked or About to be: McAfee

"I am convinced that every company in every conceivable industry with significant size and valuable intellectual property and trade secrets has been compromised (or will be shortly)," said Dmitri Alperovitch of McAfee in a blog post.

"I divide the entire set of Fortune Global 2000 firms into two categories: those that know they've been compromised and those that don't yet know," he said.

Recently, hacking has received international media attention due to the high profile exploits of LulzSec and Anonymous, who publicized their hacking exploits (in fact, publicity was the whole point of their hacking).

However, cyber security professionals like Alperovitch pointed out that far more sinister attacks have been going on for years; the public just didn't hear about it because both the victims and the perpetrators tend to keep mum on such incidents.

Alperovitch said McAfee gained access to a Command & Control server used by attackers. What they found was nothing short of astounding.

In all, 72 organizations were compromised (graphic below).

The attacks targeted entities in 14 geographic locations (graphic below).