Internet leak
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An Internet leak occurs when a party's confidential intellectual property is released to the public on the Internet. Various types of information and data can be, and have been, "leaked" to the Internet, the most common being personal information, computer software and source code, and artistic works such as albums. For example, a musical album is leaked if it has been made available to the public on the Internet before its official release date; this musical material is still intended to be confidential.
Source code leaks are usually caused by misconfiguration of software like CVS or FTP which allow people to get source files by exploiting this, by software bugs, or by employees that have access to (parts of) the source revealing the code in order to harm the company.
There were many cases of source code leaks in the history of software development. For example, in 2003 a cracker exploited a security hole in Microsoft's Outlook to get the complete source of Half-Life 2, which was still under development at the time. The complete source was soon available in various file sharing networks. This leak was rumored to be the cause of the game's delay, but later was stated not to be.
Another case involved a partial leak of the source code to Microsoft Windows 2000. It was feared that because of the leak, the number of security exploits would increase due to wider scrutinization of the source code due to Microsoft's typical[citation needed] embrace of the security through obscurity ideology.
