McAfee, a leading maker of Internet security software, warned this week that software systems used by many companies to store and manage their intellectual property are being actively targeted by hackers and are in need of significantly increased security focus.

McAfee’s assessment follows its work with several companies to help them recover from a wave of attacks last year — dubbed “Operation Aurora” — that affected the computer networks of Google and more than 30 other companies, many in Silicon Valley. Google, which revealed the attacks in January, said they originated in China and resulted in theft of its intellectual property as well as targeted assaults on the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.

In some of the hacks, attackers penetrated elaborate computer-security systems and obtained corporate data and software source code. As The New York Times reported in January, source code — the programming instructions underlying computer software — is the most valuable asset of most technology companies.

McAfee’s chief technology officer, George Kurtz, said the security company found that a “common element” in the attacks it investigated was the unauthorized access of systems that act as corporate repositories of software source code and other digital intellectual property, known as software configuration management systems.

These systems, in the case of source code, allow engineers to pull sections of code out, work on them on their workstations and then return the code to its place.