Irish companies are at greater risk from careless employees than they are from hackers, a new survey has found.

According to research from IT distributor DataSolutions, 80 per cent of Irish entities feel the actions of employees are the greatest risk to IT security. That compares with only 15 per cent who deem their main concern to be external hackers.

Although almost 90 per cent said employees knew the importance of password security, 42 per cent admitted their staff were likely to reveal their password to an unauthorised person.

More than a fifth are aware of IT security breaches that had been caused by accessing external sites such as Gmail, Facebook or YouTube, but 62 per cent of respondents said they allowed employees to access them, and 23 per cent did so without restriction.

A total of 278 IT professionals were surveyed.