I have seen a pattern of the boss or even second-tier management not even knowing it's about to happen. Like the now-famous Cloudflare botched "layoff-not-a-layoff" decisions are being made by folks who probably don't even know the people they are firing, they are just names on a spreadsheet.
The good managers I've worked for think this way, they are there to make their team better and actually care about them as humans. For anyone thinking about going into management, every business I've ever seen needs more managers that care, it's a worthwhile job and even fewer people can do it correctly than many technical jobs. Managing poorly is trivial, so we all think it's "easy".
They aren’t sure yet if someone else found it first. If a smart person found it first they could sell it piecemeal to make it harder to know where it came from. Each identity isn’t worth much but that’s a lot. Combine that with the password stuffing capability from a plain text password list and there’s…
If you ever, ever store passwords in plain text instead of hashed and salted your business should be shut down. Thats below even Security 101 level, and shows a critical carelessness for user data.
When we’re find things like this, unless we have exact audit logs proving there was no misuse, we assume it was misused because that’s the only sane way to do it.
If it turns out they have excellent logging (hah) maybe they can prove it, let’s hope so for the affected people’s sake.