It seems only fair, since our home computer is typically an office away from the office. So in between typing up reports and poring over spreadsheets, we use our office PCs to keep up with our lives. We do birthday shopping, check out funny clips on YouTube and catch up with friends by email or instant message.

And often it’s just easier to accomplish certain tasks using consumer technology than using the sometimes clunky office technology our company gives us — compare Gmail with a corporate email account.

Security expert Mark Lobel of PricewaterhouseCoopers describes the most common things employees do on the internet to jeopardize company security.
There’s only one problem with what we’re doing: Our employers sometimes don’t like it. Partly, they want us to work while we’re at work. And partly, they’re afraid that what we’re doing compromises the company’s computer network — putting the company at risk in a host of ways. So they’ve asked their information-technology departments to block us from bringing our home to work.

End of story? Not so fast. To find out whether it’s possible to get around the IT departments, we asked Web experts for some advice. Specifically, we asked them to find the top 10 secrets our IT departments don’t want us to know. How to surf to blocked sites without leaving any traces, for instance, or carry on instant-message chats without having to download software.

But, to keep everybody honest, we also turned to security pros to learn just what chances we take by doing an end run around the IT department.

For hacking advice, we asked Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker.com1, an online guide to being more productive on the Web; Leon Ho, editor of Lifehack.org2, a blog with a similar mission; and Mark Frauenfelder, founder of the wide-ranging blog BoingBoing.net3 and editor of the do-it-yourself technology magazine Make.

To find out the risks, we talked to three experts who make a living helping IT departments make the rules and track down the rogue employees who break them. They are: John Pironti, chief information risk strategist at Amsterdam-based IT-consulting firm Getronics NV; Mark Lobel, a security expert in PricewaterhouseCoopers’s advisory practice; and Craig Schmugar, a threat researcher at security-software maker McAfee Inc.

THE JOURNAL REPORT

4
• Are tech departments withering away?5 We asked three experts from Accenture, American Express and Aetna to weigh in. Plus, join a discussion forum:6 How careful are you about your company’s security? And what are your biggest frustrations with your company’s IT department?
• See the complete Technology7 report.Here, then, are the 10 secrets your IT department doesn’t want you to know, the risks you’ll face if you use them — and tips about how to keep yourself (and your job) safe while you’re at it.

* * *
1. HOW TO SEND GIANT FILES

The Problem: Everybody needs to email big files from time to time, everything from big marketing presentations to vacation photos. But if you send anything larger than a few megabytes, chances are you’ll get an email saying you’ve hit the company’s limit.

Companies cap the amount of data employees can send and store in email for a very simple reason: They want to avoid filling up their servers, and thus slowing them down, says messaging-research firm Osterman Research Inc., of Black Diamond, Wash. And getting your company to increase your email limit can be a convoluted process.

The Trick: Use online services such as YouSendIt Inc., SendThisFile Inc.

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