Revealing that 48 percent of IT security professionals surveyed have worked for organizations whose network has been breached by a hacker, identity management provider Lieberman Software Corporation has announced the results of its Password 2011 survey.

Showing potential of paving the way for a further wave of data breaches in 2011, the survey of more than 300 international IT professionals reveals a fundamental lack of IT security awareness in enterprises, particularly in the arena of password control and privileged logins. Privileged identities are accounts that hold elevated permission to access, and a reason for misuse is data leakage, the company announced in a press release.

Philip Lieberman, president and CEO of Lieberman Software, said: "This survey shows that despite the huge number of frequent data breaches, over the past 12 months senior management in many organizations have not yet grasped the fundamentals of IT security. In fact they are actively paving the way for more and bigger disasters. Password anarchy among the IT staff at major organizations is mirrored by password apathy at the top of the management hierarchy.”

Apart from apathy about password security amongst their senior management, the survey paints a vivid picture of password chaos amongst IT staff. Fifty-one percent of respondents had 10 or more passwords to remember for use in their work. In their organizations, IT staff continue to share passwords or access to systems or applications, 42 percent of those surveyed said. When it comes to illicitly accessing sensitive information, 26 percent said that they were aware of an IT staff member abusing a privileged login.

Recently, the company announced that its flagship privileged identity management solution, Enterprise Random Password Manager (ERPM), automatically discovers and updates credentials used by McAfee (News - Alert) ePolicy Orchestrator (McAfee ePO) software, including the application's powerful privileged account credentials. Lieberman Software developed this functionality to provide secure, delegated and audited access to account credentials used in McAfee ePO software. McAfee ePO software is a security management platform.