How do you accidentally publish something online?
You employ an admin who, while responding to a 4Chan DDOS attack, does it in a way that exposes lots of confidential information, including a large email archive. Incidentally, the way the information was obtained does not automatically make it inadmissible in a UK court. According to what I read, in the process of countering the DOS, the default home page was briefly moved. This exposed a listing of the root directory, which happened to contain a backup image, including 350 MB of emails, which was rapidly grabbed by the DOSers and ended up as a torrent on the Pirate Bay.
“Their site came back online [after the DDoS attack] – and on their frontpage was accidentally a backup file of the whole website (default directory listing, their site was empty), including emails and passwords,” a leader of the attacking group said.
