Etcetera

Troopers in Trouble: Pair Use State Email for Ashley Madison Signup

August 22, 2015, 10:14 AM by  Alan Stamm

Common-sense tip: Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo offer free email accounts, so don't register at an adultery site with your work address.


"We will be opening an administrative investigation into this matter," says a state police spokeswoman.

That advice may come too late for two careless state police officers in this state, Emily Lawler reports at MLive:

The Michigan State Police plan to open an administrative investigation over Ashley Madison accounts associated with at least two of their troopers.

"There is no legitimate investigatory reason one of our members would have for establishing an account on this website using their state-issued email address. Given this, we will be opening an administrative investigation into this matter," said Michigan State Police spokeswoman Tiffany Brown.

AshleyMadison.com . . . is an online service that connects people looking to have extramarital affairs. Hackers recently took member information, including emails, billing addresses and credit card information, and posted it online.

The news site isn't naming the troopers it found while reviewing the data files. Lawler also spotted at least 15 other e-mail addresses that end in michigan.gov, she reported Friday.

The emails include those connected to state employees in the Michigan State Police, Department of Transportation, Department of Health and Human Services, Licensing and Regulatory Affairs, Department of Corrections and the Department of Technology Management and Budget. . . .

State employees who are using their state emails in connection with the site could be breaking state policy, said Department of Technology Management and Budget spokesman Caleb Buhs.

A statewide acceptable use policy states that "IT Resources, including devices, networks, data, software, email and system accounts, are used to conduct official State business."

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Similar attention focuses on as many as 15,000 federal employees and military members whose government email addresses are in the leaked data -- the topic of a New York Times commentary headlined "The Ashley Madison Hack Shows We’re Too Dumb to Cheat."

In that Friday opinion column, novelist Jennifer Weiner writes:

How, I ask you, can a country be great when its government workers aren’t smart enough to scurry over to the anonymous embrace of Hotmail and Yahoo when they want to cheat? . . .

We’re talking minimal effort here, people. Five minutes, a couple of security questions, a password that isn’t PASSWORD . . . and France isn’t laughing at us anymore. 


Read more:  MLive


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