If someone came across information by accident they were not suppose to see, how could a person get in touch with the right people before "leaking it"?

https://ddosecrets.org/

Watch your ass kid. The question you want to ask yourself is “do i want to die on this hill”.

Or create a burner account here and drop it in to a bunch of communities that would be interested.

Just scrub it of anything that could be traced back to you.

First step is an attorney imo

if you’re in the States: enjoy having your lungs filled with fungus!

otherwise i’d try to find someone that specializes in the industry you’re dealing with (for example if it’s related to a Power Utility or in the financial sector)

Think about who else has access, who else flags as not part of the mission, where is evidence of this download stored (it’s probably in more places than you’d expect from a digital forensics perspective). Keep in mind tools that delete also leave voids where there should be data, which is highly suspicious. Even something like removing a drive, deleting stuff on another computer, and placing it back could be a bread crumb if the original computer logs write or read cycle counts. Copiers keep records of their documents and users who print them, this can be traced back to the documents themselves.

Also who else in your life is vulnerable to the culprits, how will media spin this against you, how will the culprits lie about your actions and documents? Is what you’re exposing against a shared enemy publicly or a relatively positive entity? Think Bill Clinton and the fawning that made Monica to take the brunt of the scrutiny off of him? Would other governments or companies highly benefit from this information being released to the point that you’d be labeled a spy?

How legal was your access? Coincidental, open door, closed door opened, locked door opened, safe opened (metaphorically for digital). Can your information alone be used to prove its own validity? How much trail have you left in your interactions with other people, especially in text form, to raise you as a suspicious entity? I’d argue if it’s you then already too much is on the internet and you’d be better served passing the concern to someone else in the know if you don’t plan on moving to Russia like Snowden. Speaking of Snowden, make sure that your redactions cover both the copier hardware signature as well as fully remove the things you’re trying to redact. There are journalists who accept tips as well as nonprofits that may take a look without ratting you out. The journalists that Snowden chose were Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Barton Gellman, and Ewen MacAskill.

If you have to ask the question, just take the secret to your grave. You should only risk the blowback on yourself if you know how properly to mitigate the risk of “doing the right thing”.

And maybe it’s fine. Like, if you found a vulnerability in a piece of FOSS software, most projects have an official path for disclosure of such things. Just look on their website and follow the instructions there. But if anyone asked me this question specifically about a vulnerability in some FOSS software, a) I’d say they don’t have the knowledge to make an informed decision whether it’s safe for them to do so and b) I’d question whether they’d actually found what they thought they’d found.

Don’t. You’ll just get blamed for their incompetence. You’ll get charged with hacking. Either anonymously leak it to the press. Or forget you saw anything.

You don’t leak it. Most info will have some identifiable source and those groups will have reportable contacts.