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Leaking confidential information can be a very risky business.
Whether it's to whistleblow about bad practices, or to expose something that you think needs to be public information, companies often go the extra yard to find out who's leaking their data if reports start to circulate.
If your company is run by a CEO like Elon Musk, you probably already have a sense that the likelihood of forgiveness is pretty microscopic, and in an interesting post on X (then called Twitter) back in 2022, Musk revealed one interesting technique he'd apparently used to root out a leaker.
That is quite an interesting story. We sent what appeared to be identical emails to all, but each was actually coded with either one or two spaces between sentences, forming a binary signature that identified the leaker.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 9, 2022
Musk was responding to a question from one of the many people who try to grab his attention on the social media platform that he now owns. The post asked: "Elon in 2008 how did you catch that employee who leaked the confidential data of Tesla and sold it to the news outlet?"
Musk then replied with a quite lengthy explanation (within those pesky character limits, anyway).
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Calling it "quite an interesting story", Musk explained how "we sent what appeared to be identical emails to all, but each was actually coded with either one or two spaces between sentences, forming a binary signature that identified the leaker".
This seemingly meant that when the leaker shared information with the media, those spaces were preserved (presumably in screenshots rather than in copy-edited text), and Musk could establish which employee's email had been leaked.
The methodology in this case is interestingly technical, but the theory behind the technique is actually a long-standing one called a canary trap. This basically involves creating multiple fake documents that you share with multiple suspects, to see which one ends up being shared, thus leading you to the culprit.
Musk's method is a little more precise than others since it can involve documents that look near-identical, making people feel even more secure.
In typically modest fashion, meanwhile, when a follow-up question asked whose idea the trap was, Musk gave a one-word reply: "Mine".
Interestingly, though, despite his somewhat brutal reputation as a boss, back in 2008 Musk and his team actually decided against legal action against the employee they caught.
The global recession meant they had way bigger fish to fry in terms of actually surviving the economic downturn that was killing companies left, right and center, and they simply didn't have the time to devote to a legal case.
Still, the employee didn't get to keep their job, unsurprisingly - Musk says: "They were invited to further their career elsewhere".
