How Elon Musk Caught Company Employee Leaking Secrets
Elon Musk shared the matter on Twitter how he found the employee who was secretly sharing all of his company, Tesla's secrets.
Tesla's chief Elon Musk is known for being pretty vocal on his Twitter account. He continues to share his views about literally everything under the son. Once in a while, the man also responds to common users on Twitter.
This time Musk revealed the genius way how he found out the Tesla employee who was leaking all of the company's secrets to the press amid the 2008 recession.
Elon Musk shares genius hack he used to find the Tesla employee leaking company secrets
A Twitter user named Vaibhav Balghare who tweets using the handle @NASAEarthMars asked the Musk how he caught hold of the Tesla employee who sold ¡®confidential data¡¯ about the company. Fortunately for him, Musk replied and his reply was purely genius.
Elon Musk resounded by saying, ¡°That is quite an 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.¡±
How Tesla caught the employee who was leaking confidential information to the press in 2008.
¡ª Tanay Jaipuria (@tanayj) October 13, 2022
Really clever pic.twitter.com/5cSw2vKj81
The employee was fired
After Musk revealed his method another user asked him as to what happened to employee who got caught. Musk replied: ¡°They were invited to further their career elsewhere.¡±
They were invited to further their career elsewhere
¡ª Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 9, 2022
Another person asked Musk if he tried suing this employee for leaking all important information. To this a very calm Musk replied, ¡°Too busy trying to survive at the time.¡±
Too busy trying to survive at the time
¡ª Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 9, 2022
While this method by Musk did seem like a genius hack, as a person who has very little idea about technology, it went straight over my head. However, many were not able to understand this 'Binary signature method' and a user on Twitter tried to simplify it for us all.
A Twitter user named TyClay answered, "Let¡¯s say one space equals a 0 and two equals a 1. You have a binary conversion. Ex. Sentence._Sentence.__Sentence._ That encodes to 010. That user now has the ID 010. Since you have two values in each spot, you can represent 2^N employees, where N is the number of sentences."
Let¡¯s say one space equals a 0 and two equals a 1. You have a binary conversion.
¡ª Ty Clay (@TyDClay) October 13, 2022
Ex. Sentence._Sentence.__Sentence._
That encodes to 010. That user now has the ID 010. Since you have two values in each spot, you can represent 2^N employees, where N is the number of sentences.
Basically each email is uniquely identified. If the email is "copied without edits, Tesla can decode the leaked email and identify which email maps onto the email ID."
Each email has been uniquely identified. If the email is copied without edits, Tesla can decode the leaked email and identify which email maps onto the email ID.
¡ª Ty Clay (@TyDClay) October 13, 2022
Using the email from above if I see that message in the news, I know that employee 010 leaked the message.
During the recession period in 2008, Tesla was nearly bankrupt due to a crazy tough year for the company.
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