MyComputerPaladin.com

According to a study performed by a company called Cyber-Ark, one out of every three Information Technology (IT) professionals surveyed (total surveyed equaled 300 people) admitted to using their high security log in accounts and passwords to access confidential employee information (such as private e-mails, salary information, and board-meeting minutes).

What this means is that if this survey is truly representative of IT employees (and one has to be very cautious here as only 300 people were surveyed), your personal information at your place of employment may very well be being accessed by people who have no real reason to do so.

You can find the original story here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25263009/.

The Paladin finds this to be a terrifying statistic (again keeping in mind that only 300 people were surveyed…not a scientific sample by any stretch of the imagination). What this means is that at your place of work you must consider that anything you do electronically is not private at all.

Now, the Paladin has worked for companies in the past that indicated in their employee manual the following:

• That absolutely NOTHING the employee does on company computer equipment should ever have an expectation of privacy.
• That the employee should assume that all phone calls are being monitored.

Now, this was somewhat surprising because the company that the Paladin worked for HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH NATIONAL DEFENSE!

In fact, he worked for a major automotive supplier!

Anyway, the point being that personal privacy at your work is rapidly disintegrated, but the worst part about this report, if it is confirmed for a majority of IT professionals, is that you may be being spied upon without your knowledge.

Perhaps the moral of this story should be that unless you are using your own equipment on your own network, you should always assume that your communication may not be private (and even then, you cannot be sure your communication is private once the data leaves your own network).