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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. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... A news leak is a disclosure of embargoed information in advance of its official release, or the unsanctioned release of confidential information. ... Confidentiality has been defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ensuring that information is accessible only to those authorized to have access and is one of the cornerstones of Information security. ... For the 2006 film, see Intellectual Property (film). ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... An album (from Latin albus white, blank, relating to a blank book in which something can be inserted) is a packaged collection of related things. ...

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 the sources of part of them revealing the code in order to harm the company. The Concurrent Versions System (CVS), also known as the Concurrent Versioning System, is an open-source version control system invented and developed by Dick Grune in the 1980s. ... “FTP” redirects here. ... A computer bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from working as intended, or produces an incorrect result. ...

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. Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Software cracking is the modification of software to remove protection methods: copy prevention, trial/demo version, serial number, hardware key, CD check or software annoyances like nag screens and adware. ... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Microsoft Office Outlook is a personal information manager from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite. ... Half-Life 2 (HL2) is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that is the sequel to Half-Life. ... A peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is a network that relies on the computing power and bandwidth of the participants in the network rather than concentrating it in a relatively few servers. ...

Also in 2003, source code to Diebold Election Systems Inc. voting machines has been 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 Windows 2000. Two files containing Microsoft source code were circulating on the Internet. One contains a majority of the NT4 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 and inet; as well as some shell code. 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. Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... Microsoft Corporation, (NASDAQ: MSFT, HKSE: 4338) is a multinational computer technology corporation with global annual revenue of US$44. ... Windows 2000 (also referred to as Win2K) is a preemptive, interruptible, graphical and business-oriented operating system that was designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi-processor 32-bit Intel x86 computers. ... An exploit is a piece of software, a chunk of data, or sequence of commands that take advantage of a bug, glitch or vulnerability in order to cause unintended or unanticipated behavior to occur on computer software, hardware, or something electronic (usually computerized). ... In cryptography and computer security, security through obscurity (sometimes security by obscurity) is to some a controversial principle in security engineering, which attempts to use secrecy (of design, implementation, etc. ...

In 2004 partial (800mb) proprietary source code that drives Cisco Systems' networking hardware was made available in the internet. The site posted two files of source code written in the C programming language, which apparently enables some next-generation Internet Protocol version 6 functionality. News of the latest source code leak appeared on a Russian security site, SecurityLab.ru. A Cisco ASM/2-32EM router deployed at CERN in 1987. ...

High-Profile Internet Leaks

• 03 October, 2003 : Half-Life 2 Source-Code
• 13 February, 2004 : Microsoft Windows 2000/NT Source-Code
• 21 February 2005 : Paris Hilton's Mobile Phone Address Book