Two council employees lost their jobs and a third quit after they were caught trying to access pornography on Kent County Council computers.

Figures reveal the trio were busted by sophisticated security devices trying to log on to the adult websites in the last year.

The news emerged as figures revealed there have been 4,199 attempts to access porn on the authority’s computers in the last six months – or 32 every working day.

But the council insists many are the result of advertisements which suddenly appear on-screen.

A spokesman said: “KCC’s monitoring system picks up all activity in web browsing, using council computers, that has been categorised as pornography.

“This activity will include advertisements and pop-up web pages that are automatically launched.

“The monitoring system has recognised 4,199 occasions when the systems recorded incidents where access to a website was blocked due to the category of the site being pornography.

“However, only three of those occasions were users attempting to view pornography.”

In October last year a member of KCC staff was sacked for trying to view pornography, while in January of this year another employee lost his job for trying to share “inappropriate material”.

In July another employee resigned after being caught trying to access pornography.

KCC says it has “sophisticated web security devices” which monitor what users look at.

They added: “These devices are linked in to a worldwide service that logs and categorises the type of content a web page contains.

“There are in total 77 categories, one of which is the category of pornography. As policy, KCC blocks all sites categorised as pornography.

“If a website is found that contains pornography and it is not already categorised then the web security devices attempt to dynamically categorise the website and assign it to the pornographic category.”

KCC revealed the extent of efforts to access pornography after a Freedom of Information Act request.

Last month it emerged that Members of Parliament, peers and their staff had accessed pornographic websites 300,000 times in the last year.

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