Internet leak
Encyclopedia
An Internet leak occurs when a party's confidential
Confidentiality
Confidentiality is an ethical principle associated with several professions . In ethics, and in law and alternative forms of legal resolution such as mediation, some types of communication between a person and one of these professionals are "privileged" and may not be discussed or divulged to...

 information is released to the public on the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

. 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
Source code
In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...

, and artistic works such as books or 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
Concurrent Versions System
The Concurrent Versions System , also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is a client-server free software revision control system in the field of software development. Version control system software keeps track of all work and all changes in a set of files, and allows several developers ...

 or FTP
File Transfer Protocol
File Transfer Protocol is a standard network protocol used to transfer files from one host to another host over a TCP-based network, such as the Internet. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and utilizes separate control and data connections between the client and server...

 which allow people to get source files by exploiting this, by software bugs, or by employees that have access to the sources of part of them 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
Software cracking
Software cracking is the modification of software to remove or disable features which are considered undesirable by the person cracking the software, usually related to protection methods: copy protection, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, date checks, CD check or software annoyances...

 exploited a security hole in Microsoft's
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Outlook to get the complete source of Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2
Half-Life 2 , the sequel to Half-Life, is a first-person shooter video game and a signature title in the Half-Life series. It is singleplayer, story-driven, science fiction, and linear...

, which was under development at the time. The complete source was soon available in various file sharing network
Peer-to-peer file sharing
P2P or Peer-to-peer file sharing allows users to download files such as music, movies, and games using a P2P software client that searches for other connected computers. The "peers" are computer systems connected to each other through internet. Thus, the only requirements for a computer to join...

s. This leak was rumored to be the cause of the game's delay, but later was stated not to be.

Also in 2003, source code to Diebold Election Systems
Diebold Election Systems
Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems, Inc. was a subsidiary of Diebold that makes and sells voting machines. In 2009 it was sold to competitor ES&S. Another subsidiary selling electronic voting systems in Brazil is Diebold-Procomp, with minor market share in that nation...

 Inc. voting machine
Voting machine
Voting machines are the total combination of mechanical, electromechanical, or electronic equipment , that is used to define ballots; to cast and count votes; to report or display election results; and to maintain and produce any audit trail information...

s was leaked. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Rice University published a damning critique of Diebold's products, based on an analysis of the software. They found, for example, that it would be easy to program a counterfeit voting card to work with the machines and then use it to cast multiple votes inside the voting booth.

Another case involved a partial leak of the source code to Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

 Windows 2000
Windows 2000
Windows 2000 is a line of operating systems produced by Microsoft for use on personal computers, business desktops, laptops, and servers. Windows 2000 was released to manufacturing on 15 December 1999 and launched to retail on 17 February 2000. It is the successor to Windows NT 4.0, and is the...

. Two files containing Microsoft source code were circulating on the Internet. One contains a majority of the NT4
Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0 is a preemptive, graphical and business-oriented operating system designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor computers. It was the next release of Microsoft's Windows NT line of operating systems and was released to manufacturing on 31 July 1996...

 source code and the other contains a fraction of the Windows 2000 source code, reportedly about 15% of the total. This includes some networking code including Winsock
Winsock
In computing, the Windows Sockets API , which was later shortened to Winsock, is a technical specification that defines how Windows network software should access network services, especially TCP/IP. It defines a standard interface between a Windows TCP/IP client application and the underlying...

 and inet; as well as some shell code. It was feared that because of the leak, the number of security exploit
Exploit (computer security)
An exploit is a piece of software, a chunk of data, or sequence of commands that takes advantage of a bug, glitch or vulnerability in order to cause unintended or unanticipated behavior to occur on computer software, hardware, or something electronic...

s would increase due to wider scrutinization of the source code.

In 2004 partial (800MB) proprietary source code that drives Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...

' networking hardware was made available in the internet. The site posted two files of source code written in the C programming language
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, which apparently enables some next-generation IPv6
IPv6
Internet Protocol version 6 is a version of the Internet Protocol . It is designed to succeed the Internet Protocol version 4...

 functionality. News of the latest source code leak appeared on a Russian security site.

On January 28, 2008, Nintendo
Nintendo
is a multinational corporation located in Kyoto, Japan. Founded on September 23, 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi, it produced handmade hanafuda cards. By 1963, the company had tried several small niche businesses, such as a cab company and a love hotel....

's crossover fighting video game Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Super Smash Bros. Brawl
Super Smash Bros. Brawl, known in Japan as , often abbreviated as SSBB or simply as Brawl, is the third installment in the Super Smash Bros. series of crossover fighting games, developed by an ad hoc development team consisting of Sora, Game Arts and staff from other developers, and published by...

for the Wii
Wii
The Wii is a home video game console released by Nintendo on November 19, 2006. As a seventh-generation console, the Wii primarily competes with Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3. Nintendo states that its console targets a broader demographic than that of the two others...

 console had a major leak having to do with unconfirmed playable characters. The leak was unintentionally started by the Japanese language
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 www.wii.com website, which released a video that included small images of not-yet confirmed characters within the game. The website fixed this mistake, but the leak still continued. Websites like YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

 contain screenshots and video gameplay of the unconfirmed characters of the game.

Sometimes, game developers who post blogs can accidentally leak information.

Recently, several high-profile books have been leaked on the Internet before their official release date, including If I Did It
If I Did It
If I Did It is a book by O. J. Simpson, in which he puts forth a hypothetical description of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Simpson was tried and acquitted of the murders in a criminal trial but later found financially liable in a civil trial...

, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and an early draft of the first twelve chapters of Midnight Sun
Midnight Sun (novel)
Midnight Sun is an unreleased companion novel to the book Twilight by author Stephenie Meyer. It would be the retelling of the events of Twilight, but written from the perspective of Edward Cullen as opposed to that of Bella Swan. Meyer has stated that Twilight is the only book from the series that...

. The leak of the latter prompted the author Stephenie Meyer
Stephenie Meyer
Stephenie Meyer is an American author known for her vampire romance series Twilight. The Twilight novels have gained worldwide recognition and sold over 100 million copies globally, with translations into 37 different languages...

 to suspend work on the novel.

High-profile Internet leaks

  • 3 October 2003: Half-Life 2 source code
  • 13 February 2004: Microsoft Windows 2000/NT source code
  • November 2009: Climatic Research Unit email leak
    Climatic Research Unit email controversy
    The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia...

    , aka Climategate

See also

  • News leak
    News leak
    A news leak is a disclosure of embargoed information in advance of its official release, or the unsanctioned release of confidential information.-Types of news leaks:...

  • Release (music)
    Release (music)
    In the music industry, a release is usually a term referring to the creative output from an artist available for sale or distribution; a broad term covering the many different formats music can be released in, and different forms of pieces .The word can also refer to the event at which an album or...

  • royaldutchshellplc.com
    Royaldutchshellplc.com
    royaldutchshellplc.com is a Royal Dutch Shell gripe site and blog operated by Alfred and John Donovan, who engaged in several marketing campaigns with Shell during the 1980s and early 1990s...

  • Software release life cycle
  • WikiLeaks
    Wikileaks
    WikiLeaks is an international self-described not-for-profit organisation that publishes submissions of private, secret, and classified media from anonymous news sources, news leaks, and whistleblowers. Its website, launched in 2006 under The Sunshine Press organisation, claimed a database of more...

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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