We're a crazily cavalier bunch, we Brits. Or at least we are when it comes to protecting our companies’ precious data while working at home.

An international study of teleworking professionals puts Britain way down in the league of hack-proof homeworkers. In fact, we’re happy to play fast and loose with sensitive information the moment we leave the office.

We might finally have grasped that it’s dumb to send cash to Nigerian Navy generals or share account details with the Nattweest Banqua, but it’s a different matter when protecting corporate computers.

The ten-nation study, by the communications company Cisco, suggests that British teleworkers are worst at defending systems from spyware and virus attacks. ”Protecting” is hardly the word: half of us happily open suspicious attachments from unknown senders. And why not? They might contain something droll or porny.

Such recklessness is on the increase. The number of Britons who let relatives, flatmates and others use company computers and PDAs doubled between 2006 and 2007. It’s a serious problem because, says the Computer Security Institute, financially motivated attacks last year overtook traditional virus attacks for the first time. IT experts say that teleworkers need more education in security, but perhaps the problem lies deeper than just training.

When we get home late and tired, we want to relax. We certainly don’t want the IT police breathing down our necks. That doesn’t make us intentionally reckless, but it’s just plain hard to bother with all that self-discipline stuff outside the corporate setting.

As more hard-pressed Brits work from home, company data is going to become ever more vulnerable to attack. But maybe companies will consider that a small price to pay for nibbling ever more time out of our personal lives.

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