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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

We once had a contractor who used our printer to print out a letter to a competitor, offering to sell them our source code. Unfortunately, one of our employees visited our printer at the wrong time (for the contractor)...

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At one of my previous jobs we had two employees who decided to strike out on their own. While still employed, they secretly started e-mailing our customers with offers, from their company e-mail accounts. They were of course quickly discovered (after a customer asked our boss about weird offers they were receiving) and fired. I know OPSEC is hard, but sometimes the stupidity you see is beyond imagination...

Maybe they thought using the company's email accounts would give them credibility... instead of demonstrating both their poor judgment and lack of trustworthiness.

The improbably named NSA contractor Reality Winner was busted recently for something like this, printing out classified documents at work and leaking them to news sources.

http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-realit...

What happened? That's a fantastic story opener.

We didn't do any further business with that contractor. (Not only were they dishonest, but they produced garbage code.) Our code ran on an embedded system with custom hardware, so the source code wouldn't do our competitors much good. I don't know if the sale ever happened or not. I don't think we pursued legal action, but I don't know.

Hopefully your competitor would have told you anyway. But wow, didn't think this actually happens. Plus, why print out the letter??

1. Type email

2. Save as pdf

3. Print

4. Mail

Its never been easier to send an email than now

> Plus, why print out the letter??

This was in the early 90s. We didn't have internet yet.

Jail time?

I'm not sure that's criminal unless it involves foreign powers. Maybe if you can characterize it as a theft or conspiracy to steal, but I think that's hard with non tangible items.

It's certainly a civil tort.

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