[Photo: Baidu]

A new survey reveals a massive increase in the number of cyber attacks affecting the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong over the past 12 months.

The Global State of Information Security Survey, from PricewaterhouseCoopers, has identified over 12-hundred security incidents on the mainland and on the island in the last year.

The number represents and increase of over 500 percent compared to the previous year, when just over 200 incidents were recorded.

The average financial loss for each cyber crime was 2.6 million US dollars, an increase of 10 percent year-on-year. The global average recorded a decline of five percent.

Hackers are said to be targeting customer data, internal records, and intellectual property. The global survey is based on responses from over 10-thousand executives in 127 countries, including 330 companies from the mainland and Hong Kong.