I made the mistake of logging on the employer Guest internet and I opened my steamy personal gmail email account (without knowing I was on company internet) from my personal cellphone and I opened a steamy email message but did not reply.
Can an IT guru inform me if it possible to link me to this considering that I used the Guest internet from my cellphone. I accessed other normal websites and other stuff that day on my phone which can show my name. Now I am worried I am fired if they audit the Guest internet activity.
I’d appreciate input from anyone with experience in this
I’m a software developer. In theory, yes, this could be done, especially if they have the cooperation of your email provider. In practice, unless they have a burning need to identify the culprit, they aren’t going to have the resources to track down a single naughty email.
Now, if you accessed other stuff on the company connection that did include your name, it’s possible that it could be logged. But IT departments generally are busy enough fixing network printers, resetting people’s passwords, and looking out for real hackers that they are unlikely to bother digging that deep into the logs. If someone is hitting hotxxxbabes 24/7 and using massive amounts of bandwidth, then yes, they are probably going to look into that.
It’s impossible to say without knowing more details of your corporate network and security policies. It might or might not be possible based on a number of factors. However, in my experience doing security at big companies, the guest network is usually lightly monitored. Unless someone was attacking the main network or doing something illegal on the guest network, we didn’t care much. Depending on the place, we might have had the ability to track down users on the guest net, but we rarely bothered.
When you say “steamy”, is that a euphemism for something, oh, say, illegal? Or are you just talking about looking at some run of the mill porn? If the latter, your corporate IT probably won’t care. If the former, and the cops come to your IT group saying that one of their IP addresses accessed the material, they will probably do everything they can to find you.
This. If we are talking about a steamy “omg when r u cumming home I want 2 do u so bad” love letter, you have little to worry about. If there were, say, visual pornographies of a less than legal nature that were attached to that email and that were downloaded over the company network, then yes, you probably have a bit more to be afraid of. But then anyone dealing with that stuff ought to be afraid of being caught anyway, and probably already knows it.
He said he used the same phone on the guest network and then later that day the non-guest network.
I presume they can keep a log of the MAC addresses of the devices that access the guest network. They can then simply cross-reference that with the MAC addresses of the devices that accessed the non-guest network. It seems trivial to identify him. Or do I misunderstand how this works?
Even if I didn’t read the OP correctly, if he ever used that phone on the non-guest network where he presumably had to identify himself, his MAC address would be in their records.
If you connected to gmail’s SSL server (https://gmail.google.com) then your IT department should have no idea about the contents of your email since the data to/from your phone would be encrypted. Now, if there was a link to a dirty site within that email that you clicked on, that is a different story.
Depends. On some networks where I’ve worked, logs aged off the guest network very quickly. So, we might not have been able to correlate MACs across the two environments, depending on the time lapse.