Harry Potter and the Spoiler of Secrets

But despite unprecedented measures taken to keep all details of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' under wraps up to the moment of its official release at 12:01am Saturday morning, digital photographs of the book's pages were leaked over the Internet late Monday, and on Tuesday customers of an online book seller began receiving copies, according to a statement by Scholastic, U.S. publisher of the wildly successful fantasy series.

Could those leaks have been prevented? Scholastic and Bloombury, the U.K. publisher, reportedly spent up to $20 million on security to preserve the integrity of the 'magic moment' of the midnight release. Was that enough? And how much of the security effort was "marketing porn" and how much of it was real?

ChannelWeb spoke with IT security professionals and sources close to the publishing process in an attempt to recreate what the Harry Potter team might have done to protect the manuscript for as long as they did and what they might have done differently to have succeeded in preventing any leaks at all.

We broke the security effort down into three stages.

First, the longest period, encapsulating the editing, revision, design and production process that started when author J.K. Rowling finished her first draft of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows' in mid-January through to the shipping of the final version to print sometime in late spring. Second, the printing process itself, when the number of individuals handling the manuscript (and potentially leaking it) grew exponentially. Finally, the distribution phase, which may have begun as early as late June, when security almost entirely ceased to be controlled by the publishers and printer, and became the responsibility of thousands of outside distributors, retailers and libraries.

NEXT: Securing The Editing and Design Stage