Half of IT employees would use their access rights at work to hunt for information that could prove useful if they were fired from the company, a survey by security vendor Cyber-Ark has revealed.

Rumours that job cuts were looming, meanwhile, would send 46 per cent of workers to look for a redundancy list within the company network.

Adam Bosnian, vice president of products, strategy and sales at Cyber-Ark, warned that firms must protect sensitive information carefully.

"Our advice is to allow access to sensitive information only to those that really need it, lock it away in a digital vault and encrypt the really sensitive data," he said.

Over half (56 per cent) of workers surveyed admitted to being worried about losing their jobs, and more than half of these had already downloaded competitive corporate data which they plan to use as a negotiating tool to secure their next post.

Top of the list of desirable information is customer and contact databases, followed by product information and access/password codes.

Memory sticks were the most popular way of extracting information, although photocopying, email, CDs, online encrypted storage websites, smartphones, DVDs, cameras, Skype and iPods were also used.

The study surveyed 600 IT workers across Europe.