David Bridges
Elon Musk shared the clever way he discovered a Tesla employee had been leaking information to the press during the 2008 recession.
On Sunday (9 October), Vaibhav Balghare, who goes by@NASAEarthMars on Twitter, asked the SpaceX and Tesla CEO how he was able to catch the staff member who released “confidential data” about the company.
Musk saw the tweet and responded, explaining how he got to the bottom of the “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,” Musk tweeted on Sunday.
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Another account on Twitter known as @MirrorinSpace wanted to know what happened after the employee was found out, and Musk wrote: “They were invited to further their career elsewhere.”
The Great Recession of 2008 was considered one of the worst times for businesses and sparked a worldwide financial crisis.
That year, Tesla almost approached bankruptcy on Christmas Eve after the company had a “crazy tough year.”
In December 2021, Musk wrote a bit about the rough moments.
“Tesla financing closed at 6pm Christmas Eve – last hour of the last day possible. Payroll would otherwise have bounced two days after Christmas,” he tweeted to a fan.
The way to expose how an information leak happens is called a canary trap.
A report from Dartmouth University states that a canary trap is a “technique in espionage [that] spreads multiple versions of false documents to conceal a secret.”
The traps are used to find information leaks or cause distractions to hide valuable information.
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