Almost one-fifth of office employees admit using the same password for both personal and work use, highlighting a serious data security risk to employers.

A survey on office behaviour follows similar research in which the majority of managers said they were more concerned with employee behaviour than with hackers.

Those concerns appear to be justified, as the use of a single password across all platforms makes a breach of company security more likely.

David Keating, security sales manager at DataSolutions, who commissioned the survey, said: “With 17 per cent of employees admitting to using the same password, they are potentially exposing the company to a number of cyber threats.”

He highlighted the LinkedIn security attack in 2012 in which 6.5 million passwords were compromised.

“LinkedIn contains a lot of information on an individual’s place of work, company information and quite often provides their work email address. This could have been a catastrophe,” he said.

The research was commissioned by DataSolutions in conjunction with RSA, the security division of EMC, and was completed by the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School last month. Some 250 office workers were interviewed in relation to online behaviour.

Similar survey

A similar survey last year found 80 per cent of 278 IT managers were more concerned with the actions of careless employees than hackers.

The latest research also found that about two-thirds of employees would change their online behaviour if they thought their employers could monitor it.

A similar proportion said they could access social media sites in work, such as Facebook and YouTube.