I worked briefly at VMware. An exploit like this doesn't surprise me one bit.

We had a company mailing list that people used to email jokes back and forth all the time.

One rather ignorant programmer put a rule on his email where he would get an alert whenever anybody emailed him with a particular word in the subject line. That word happened to get into a rather popular email thread, and in the middle of the thread we started getting complaints from him asking us to change the subject line because his pager was beeping off the hook.

Career limiting move! He took a lot of heat for making poor assumptions.