"This is NSA-level infection mechanism," said security firm Kaspersky Lab.
In June 2013, security firm Kaspersky Lab estimated that 37.3m people had encountered phishing attacks in the last year, including more than 1m people in the UK alone.
Security firm Kaspersky Lab discovered new malware like that used in the attack on Sony Pictures being deployed in further attacks against other companies.
There has been a shift in willingness to make a public disclosure," said Kurt Baumgartner, a senior security researcher at the Moscow-based cyber-security firm Kaspersky Lab.
David Jacoby, senior security researcher at internet security firm Kaspersky Lab, said: "The vulnerability is not targeting individuals, but servers hosted on the internet.
Cisco's annual security report claimed in January that 99% of all malware in 2013 targeted Android devices, while security firm Kaspersky Lab suggested a similar figure of 98% in December last year.
The firm, Kaspersky Lab, said that the virus appeared to have been written by the same programmers who created Flame, the data-mining computer virus that was found to be spying on computers in Iran in May, and that it might be linked to Stuxnet, the virus that disrupted uranium enrichment work in Iran in 2010.
Security firm Kaspersky Lab said it too had spotted Regin being used to infiltrate networks and steal data.
Research led by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has identified more than 1,200 specimens of the malware.
David Emm, a senior researcher at security firm Kaspersky Lab, told the BBC that automatic encryption was "probably more about privacy than about protection".
