• Kaspersky’s latest report reveals that 4 percent of employees at 50 banks use their email to register on adult content websites.
• This is part of a wider trend where 7 percent of compromised data stolen between 2019 and 2024 contained corporate email addresses.
• Combined with poor password security, this could lead to corporate email addresses being compromised.

Sometimes you don’t need to say something out loud for people to understand. For example, fries, should come with a burger. Coca-Cola should be served cold and, perhaps most importantly, you shouldn’t be using your work email to sign up for adult content websites.

That last one seemingly needs to be said out loud though given some data Kaspersky has shared with us today.

The cybersecurity firm revealed this information in its report, The Evolving Threat Landscape of Infostealers, which you can download for free, here. As part of that report, Kaspersky looked at information leaked from popular entertainment websites between 2019 and 2024. It found that 7 percent of leaked credentials used a corporate email address to register an account for Roblox, Netflix or Discord.

Looking specifically at the banking sector, Kaspersky discovered corporate emails being used by 4 percent of employees at 50 banks, to register on “adult content websites”. This is not only incredibly risky, it’s incredibly dumb as well. Banks generally have very strict cybersecurity rules and can often monitor the internet traffic of employees. This also includes monitoring emails, the same email 4 percent of employees figured was a good choice for receiving updates about their adult content preferences.

The majority of bank employees – 48 percent – are registering an account on a streaming platform using their work email address. Again, this is incredibly silly as if you lose your job, you will make it tougher to access your account if you ever need to reset your password.

Bank employees also use their email addresses to register on marketplaces, games, and social networks to varying levels.

Kaspersky also found students using their student email to register for digital services but this is a bit more understandable and less of a risk than an employee signing up for a smut account using their work email.

So why is using your work email address to register on websites such a big problem?

Generally speaking, employees are less inclined to care about the security of their work email than their personal emails. This is because there is an IT team tasked with protecting the perimeter. As such, if you use a weak password for your Netflix account, chances are your work email account’s password is just as weak.

“Registering on various services for personal use with a work email is not best practice. First, you may lose access to these accounts if you change jobs. Second, it can pose security risks for both you and your company. If your passwords follow a predictable pattern across different services – for example, ‘Word2025!’, where ‘2025’ is a recurring part – it increases the likelihood of other accounts being compromised, including your work account, should your corporate email be exposed in a dark web leak,” explains Sergey Shcherbel, an expert at Kaspersky Digital Footprint Intelligence.

This would give attackers a clear path toward your corporate environment, all because you decided that you needed to set up a streaming account using your corporate email address.