How to Learn from Larry Mendte and Alycia Lane

According to TransWorldNews, Larry Mendte has allegedly opened e-mail of former co-worker Alycia Lane. The FBI is investigating him for opening Lane's personal Yahoo e-mails. This is considered a federal offense and appropriate measures are being taken to ascertain whether Mendte indeed committed the crime. Mendte is a current newscaster for KYW-TV (CBS3) and Lane was a former co-worker of his.

At the office where I previously worked, confidentiality was certainly not a commonly followed practice. As a joke, certain employees would often "hack" into the e-mails of co-workers. In some cases, this simply involved opening work related e-mails and teasing the writer for minor mistakes in a good-natured manner. However, others were less kind and their intention was to hurt or upset others. In many cases, these employees would watch while others logged into the system, or into their private e-mail, then use that information against the victim.

Another way of gathering information about co-workers included waiting until the victim left their computer for a moment while logged in and reading e-mails, or forwarding them to others. In this manner, a certain co-worker of mine was able to have access to my private e-mail for a time. Fortunately, it was not an e-mail I used for anything other than junk mail or less important e-mail, but it was scary to find that people would do such a thing merely for their own entertainment.

Co-workers can seem like friends, because you spend more time with them than with people in your circle of friends. Often, you spend more waking time with your co-workers than with your family. But the time spent with these people is not necessarily quality time. You may not know many things about the people with whom you work. The combination of an increased level of comfort and an ultimate lack of knowledge about these strangers can be dangerous.

Keeping yourself safe at work is ultimately your own responsibility. There are a number of ways that you can avoid theft of e-mail. Although in my case, the e-mail theft was innocuous and only meant for the culprit's amusement, others may be more ill intentioned. Identity theft can easily occur if people get access to your e-mail, either in the true legal sense (how many of us keep important passwords or personal information in our e-mail folders?) or in another way (co-workers could send e-mails with your name on them if they have access to the correct information and can really damage your reputation and cause great harm).

Always, ALWAYS log off or lock your computer if you're going to be away from it. Even if you're just running next door or down to the break room, go ahead and lock it up. Even if your personal e-mail is not open, a savvy person can still log in, and there's always your work e-mail that they can get into.

Try to minimize time spent on personal e-mail. This is good practice in any case. If you haven't logged in to your personal e-mail, that information is not available for someone to take. Most company policies ask that employees either minimizes time spent on personal e-mail or don't do it at all. Who knows? Your work performance may improve, too.

Make it a practice to clean your cache and delete cookies on a regular basis. Even on your home computer, this will improve the speed and quality of your 'Net experience. In Firefox, they even created a simple series of keystrokes do use to do this quickly and efficiently: Ctrl-Shift-D. In Netscape and Internet Explorer, you can go through an options function to delete your history and cookies.

Don't save passwords on your computer. Don't post any passwords or codes anywhere that is readily apparent to others. This includes in your top desk drawer: even though it may feel hidden and private, if someone is going to the lengths to get into your personal e-mail, they certainly won't feel any qualms about opening your desk drawer.

Never share your passwords with anyone. It may seem obvious, but it's so easy to have a situation where you need information from your e-mail, quickly give your password to someone else (perhaps a co-worker whom you feel is trustworthy) and forget to change it later. Nothing is so important as to risk that. Additionally, there's no reason, except perhaps being locked out of your system at work, that you should have to give your password to anyone, even if they ask. The IT people may occasionally need to get in, but they have workarounds, or will have you change your password later.