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Access to special administrative passwords means that IT department workers can rifle through confidential information with privileged and anonymous access to virtually any system within an organisation, the survey said.

One respondent to the survey of 200 IT professionals said that if people had the kind of access to files they had they would do the same. 'Why does it surprise you that so many of us snoop around your files, wouldn't YOU if you had secret access to anything you can get your hands on,' they said.

The survey also found that more than half of IT professionals keep their administrator passwords on a Post-It note, in spite of all

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the education and reminders to do differently.

One administrator told the survey that it was easy for an employee to update the personal password to their laptop, 'but to change the administrator password on that same machine? It would take days for IT to do them all by hand. In the end, we just pick one password for all the systems and write it down.'

The study, carried out by IT security company Cyber-Ark, found that 20 per cent of organisations admitted that they rarely changed their administrative passwords with seven per cent saying they never change administrative passwords. Eight per cent of IT professionals revealed that the manufacturers default admin password on critical systems had never been changed, which remains the most common way for hackers to break into corporate networks.

Calum Macleod, European director at Cyber-Ark said that it was surprising to find out how rife snooping the workplace was.

'Companies need to wake up to the fact that if they don't introduce layers of security, tighten up who has access to vital information, and manage and control privileged passwords, then snooping, sabotage and hacking will continue to be rife,' he said.