Upwards of 36 million email addresses were compromised when hackers infiltrated Ashley Madison, a site designed to help married people have affairs. Those email addresses, first released as an ungainly data dump, are now easily
searchable on a number of different sites, leaving millions of people, some more famous than others, susceptible to personal and, it turns out, professional backlash.
Amazingly, tens of thousands of people, including more than
15,000 military and government personnel, decided to use their work email addresses to sign up for a dalliance,
and if you’re wondering whether that puts them at any professional risk, the answer is almost certainly yes. A majority of American businesses monitor what their employees do online in some way or other, and they are not shy about cracking down on misbehavior.
According to a survey conducted by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute,
more than one-quarter of employers have fired employees for misusing their work email addresses and more than one-third have fired workers for misusing the Internet.
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