LOS ANGELES, May 13 (Xinhua) -- Two-thirds of teens polled in a recent survey admitted that they have tried to hack into a friend's instant messaging or social networking account, an Internet security firm said on Wednesday.

    A total of 67 percent of the teens polled said they had tried to hack into the Instant Messaging (IM) or social-networking accounts of friends, according to the survey by Panda Security, which is based in Glendale, Los Angeles.

    The survey of 4,000 adolescents between the ages of 15 and 18 found that 17 percent of the young computer users claim to have advanced technical knowledge and can find hacking tools on the Internet.

    Of those, some 30 percent claim to have used those hacking tools on at least one occasion -- mostly out of curiosity, according to the survey.

    In addition, 20 percent of the teens polled said that they had sent compromising photos of friends over the Internet or published them to the Web without consent.

    "The advanced knowledge that many adolescents acquire through free tools and content available on the Web can often lead them to engage in illegal online activities," said Luis Corrons, technical director of Panda Labs, the center of Panda Security's technical support services.

    "We have found cases of teenagers using Trojans to spy on their partners, hacking school servers to see exam papers or even stealing the identity of friends or colleagues on social networks," he said.

    The survey also found that more than half of the adolescents in the study said they use the Internet daily, spending an average of18.5 hours per week online. Just one-third of that time is devoted to studying, the teens say, while the remainder is spent on chatting, listening to music and other leisure activities.