As corporations across the country have come to understand the nature of today’s fast-evolving cyber-threat landscape, many of them are asking themselves the same question: What kind of security team does an organization need?

The modest recoveries in the economy and the painful security lessons of last year – such as the theft of millions of credit card details or valuable intellectual property in single, calculated heists – have prompted companies of all sizes and in every sector to rethink their hiring priorities and step up their recruiting in cybersecurity.

According to data from employment market information firm Wanted Technologies, cybersecurity job openings across the country went up from 32,000 to 40,000 in the first three months of the year, a 25 percent increase.

“We’ve had the busiest quarter we’ve had in a number of years,” said Joyce Brocaglia, chief executive officer of information security recruitment firm Alta Associates. “We probably have a 50 percent-plus increase in the number of companies that are coming to us with security positions this year compared to the same period last year. It’s huge.”

Information security recruiting specialist Jeff Combs said companies are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of information security.

“The economy has been so poor in the last couple of years that companies working with skeleton crews and limited resources are at a point where they can’t continue handling risk management if they’re constantly understaffed,” he said.

As a result, firms across all sectors – including e-commerce, financial services, health care, online gaming and government contractors – are thinking more about who’s handling their security.

But finding the right people is not necessarily an easy job, because companies are looking for specific skills in candidates, and those specialists are in short supply.

Recruiters said their clients are mainly looking for people with experience in identity and access management and cloud computing.

Alan Paller, director of research at the cybersecurity training group SANS Institute, said organizations with large stakes in protecting against attacks are looking for skills necessary to detect evidence of attacks, such as forensics and reverse engineering.

For instance, Google, which is already praised in the security community for its strong team of experts, has advertised more than a dozen security positions on its job website and LinkedIn for several weeks.

“Looking for high-quality security talent is always a focus of ours, but, … we do have quite a few openings right now,” Google spokesman Jay Nancarrow said in an e-mail. “We definitely would like to grow our team to help us with a variety of important and challenging opportunities.”

It is unclear whether the recent security openings preceded or are related to the December cyberattack that Google said originated in China and that the New York Times reported in late April was intended to seize the source code of the company’s password system.

“Your assumption is that Google, of all companies, would be able to defend itself, and it couldn’t,” Paller said. “In the aftermath of the China mess, they found out that the tools that people thought would protect them fail to protect against these advances threats.”

Other Internet and technology giants such as Amazon.com, eBay, Microsoft and Adobe Systems are also currently advertising dozens of security-related jobs in their websites.

Brocaglia said having more people thinking about security also means more work for second-market organizations like security vendors and consultants that cater to small and medium businesses that need to outsource their security operations.