Source code leak
A source code leak (usually just code leak or source leak) is the unwanted revealing of a company's proprietary or closed source code to other parties. This can either be caused by misconfiguration of a software like CVS or FTP which allow people to get source files by exploiting this, by software bugs, or by employees that have access to (parts of) the source revealing the code in order to harm the company.
There were many cases of source leaks in the history of software development. For example, in 2003 a cracker exploited a security hole in Microsoft's Outlook to get the complete source of Half-Life 2, which was still under development at the time. The complete source was soon available in various file sharing networks, causing the games release date to be pushed back a whole year.
Another case involved a partial leak of the source code to Microsoft Windows 2000. It was feared that because of the leak, the number of security exploits would increase due to wider scrutinization of the source code. Eventually, only one exploit surfaced, with a bug due to rendering malformed bitmap images in the BMP file format in Internet Explorer.
