Dive Brief:

• Hundreds of bankers may have used their work email addresses to register for the adultery website AshleyMadison.com, MarketWatch found after searching data provided by security researcher Robert Graham.
• The banking industry is hardly alone, of course. There no doubt will be more industry-based revelations as the news media begins to dig deeper into the databases.
• In fact, some were foolish enough to sign up using company and government work email addresses, making them especially easy to positively identify. CNN's quick review found 6,904 addresses linked to the Canadian and American governments, plus another 7,239 in the U.S. Army, 3,531 in the Navy, 1,114 Marines and 628 in the Air Force.

Dive Insight:

While adultery typically is not mentioned in standard HR policy documents, some employers (military, for example) do consider it against the rules. On the other hand, company brands popping up in the database can't be a good thing.

And if an employee is dallying on adult sites using a work address, that may be grounds for dismissal, according to an article at Time. While most jurisdictions prevent employers from taking adverse action against employees who, for example, engage in lawful but frowned-upon conduct when outside the office, companies are free to set their own rules when it comes to using work accounts for personal matters.

“[Under these circumstances] it wouldn’t really matter that it’s AshleyMadison.com, it could be a more innocuous website,” Anthony Oncidi, a Los Angeles-based labor and employment attorney at law firm Proskauer Rose, told Time. “It’s still evidence that you’re using your work email address for something that clearly has nothing to do with the business.”