Businesses could risk an information leak by using insecure software, according to a major computing firm.

Following research into 200 businesses, risk management organisation Veracode understood that 62 per cent of those interviewed had suffered a security breach over the space of the last year due to vulnerability exploitation in critical software applications on the company server.

Only 13 per cent of respondents were aware of the quality of the application security surrounding critical operations, highlighting issues of ignorance or lack of action concerning sensitive data.

Furthermore, small businesses in IT are under-funding their security, with 64 per cent stating they are having problems in fighting off problems with restricted budgets despite wanting to do all they can to oppose malicious codes.

"Given the prolific use of third-parties to build business critical applications, global enterprises need a single flexible and cost-effective solution to seamlessly test the security across their entire application portfolio," stated chief executive officer of Veracode Matt Moynahan.

Veracode was founded in 2006 by executives from Symantec, VeriSign and Guardent.

More than half of small businesses (53 per cent) believe that the most important benefit of outsourcing is guaranteed response times for IT support. London-based Connect conducted the research in 2007.