Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Leaked emails with both embarrassing and painful consequences

It seems like every month there is some kind of news story about leaked emails. When emails never intended for the public eye are leaked, the consequences can be huge. People have lost their jobs, whole companies have been embarrassed, and in some cases the information revealed can even be dangerous.
Considering how easily emails can be leaked, it’s almost surprising we don’t hear about leaks more often. Here are the five kinds of leaks that seem to be the most common:

  • Internal emails forwarded to people outside the company.
  • Hacked email accounts (extra dangerous because the entire email account becomes exposed).
  • Emails uncovered during legal investigations.
  • Personal emails leaked internally in a company.
  • People accidentally sending emails to the wrong email address (we get a fair share of those to the Pingdom support inbox).

Whenever you communicate via email, there is a small chance that someone sooner or later shares it with people you never intended it for.
Here are a few famous examples of leaked emails and what their consequences were.

The Twitter confidential document leak

This summer a large number of internal documents from Twitter were leaked. How did it happen? A French hacker managed to get into the email accounts of several Twitter employees, and from those downloaded emails, attached documents and other sensitive, internal information. He then made this information available to, among others, TechCrunch, who posted some of the information online.

Steve Jobs admits to launching MobileMe too soon

When Apple launched its MobileMe service in July 2008 it was plagued by excessive downtime and other capacity-related problems. A month later, an internal email to Apple employees from Steve Jobs leaked to the public where he admitted that the service had been rushed out and that it had been a mistake to launch it at the same time as the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software update. Apple ended up giving MobileMe users two free months as compensation.

Email leak reveals secret MediaDefender anti-piracy tactics

In 2007, almost 700 MB of internal company emails from the controversial anti-piracy company MediaDefender were leaked by hackers, revealing the tactics used to counter file sharing of copyrighted content over the Internet. In an ironic twist, the documents were spread and distributed over BitTorrent. Practices that the company had previously denied using were confirmed in these emails.

Leaked email shows Microsoft funding battle against Linux

In 2004, a leaked email seemed to implicate that Microsoft was secretly helping SCO raise money for its legal battle(s) against open source Linux makers. Whether this was a misunderstanding by an external consultant, as SCO contended, or not, it still created a wave of speculation that didn’t exactly create goodwill for SCO or Microsoft.
And now a painfully embarrassing example to cap this off:

Dear employees, please buy our wine

In 2006, a leaked internal email from the drinks giant Constellation revealed that the company had been asking their employees in the UK to buy the company’s own products in an effort to win a big contract to supply a chain of 650 pubs with house wine. Just listen to this:

The email to employees read: “To date we have had a poor response to our invitation to get all employees to visit their local JD Wetherspoon outlet and purchase Nottage Hill Chardonnay & Shiraz (and Echo Falls in the Bristol area) and reclaim via expenses.
“We would implore each of you to participate in this activity as it is vitally important that we maximise volumes.”

More examples of email leaks

When we collected the examples of leaked emails there were enough interesting examples to fill a book, and since this is just a blog post we had to draw the line somewhere. But here are a few more that stood out:

As mentioned, this is just the tip of a very big iceberg. If you want more, do a web search for “leaked email” and you’ll have tens of thousands of examples to wade through.

SolarWinds Observability SaaS now offers synthetic transaction monitoring

Powerful transaction monitoring now complements the availability and real user [...]

Exit Rate vs Bounce Rate – Which One You Should Improve and Why

Tracking your website’s exit and bounce rates will give you insight into how [...]

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free