Parents, you know this: In many cases your young kids get smart enough so that when you threaten them with some sort of punishment ("Do you want to lose your dessert tonight?") they realize they can disarm you completely by just agreeing to the punishment outright ("Sure, take it away!").

Apparently the same trick works with digital corporate sabotage:

A hacker group claims to have stolen and leaked a trove of Nestlé's data. The company says that can't possibly be true. Why? Because the data was actually leaked by Nestlé itself several weeks ago.

In emails to Gizmodo, a Nestlé spokesperson disavowed allegations from the hacktivist collective Anonymous, which claimed this week to have stolen and leaked a 10 gigabyte tranche from the global food and beverage conglomerate. Anonymous said it was punishing Nestlé for its reticence to withdraw from Russia, as a host of other major companies have done. The data, which Anonymous said included internal emails, passwords, and information on Nestlé's customers, was posted to the web on Tuesday...

The spokesperson explained that the trove of data floating around the web was, in fact, the product of a mistake the company made earlier this year: "It relates to a case from February, when some randomized and predominantly publicly available test data of a B2B nature was made accessible unintentionally online for a short period of time."

That's right: Nestlé hacked its own data!

If you're Anonymous, this has got to be a pretty humiliating experience. You try and take credit for hacking a chocolate drink company and the chocolate drink company just publicly dunks on you.

Go home, Anonymous, you lost this one, fellas!

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