[seanhunter]

Not sure whether you're serious, but leaking issues you find during diligence in order to buy a company cheap could well constitute unlawful disclosure of inside information, and therefore, market abuse. And obviously depending on where you are in the diligence process you probably would have had to sign an NDA, so you would be violating that also.

The laws vary a lot by jurisdiction, but in Europe, the relevant regulations arise from the EU Market Abuse Directive https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... and from a quick reread this information would be considered inside information, so this would be market abuse if the company was traded on a regulated exchange.

[lixtra]

On HN, if you present a technical hack, everybody likes it and thinks it's a interesting proposition. It does not matter that it is usually illegal to exploit it in real life.

However if you come with a business hack, people tend to point out that it's so illegal. The point of the OP is that black hat business hackers could still exploit it and they likely have ways to leak such information anonymously.

It's understood that just like black hat computer hackers they are in huge trouble if they get caught and OP does not encourage anyone to perform illegal actions.

[kasey_junk]

You can’t usually take over a company anonymously.

[jjoonathan]

You can leak information to cut its price by half anonymously.

[kurthr]

Investment bankers are notoriously leaky. Keep that in mind, if you're in DD, or looking for financing. I won't speculate on why.