Former Microsoft Employee Arrested on Charges of Leaking Windows 8 and Company Information

Microsoft has a problem with leaks but may be taking action. In the months prior to the release of Windows 8 to the market, many details were revealed based on leaks whose origin could now have been discovered. An internal investigation would have led the FBI to the source of those leaks: a former employee of the company

Arrested on Wednesday, Alex Kibkalo has been accused of leaking preview versions of Windows 8 to a French tech blogger in mid-2012 and You can be convicted of theft of trade secrets.Kibkalo worked for seven years at Microsoft in Russia and Lebanon as a software architect and reportedly ended up pissed off by an internal review of the controversial system the company until recently maintained as an underperformer.

Microsoft reported its suspicions about Kibkalo to the FBI last July, nearly a year after an internal investigation in which it admitted the leak and was caught bragging about other things like Windows 7 program code or the theft of Microsoft's anti-copy system called 'Activation Server Software Development Kit'. Kibkalo would have encouraged the blogger to post details of it that could be used to break the copy protections of Microsoft products.

Before publishing it, the blogger tried to confirm its veracity by sending it toanother Microsoft employee who would have informed his superiors of the existence of the leakThe company's investigators then tried to discover the identity of the blogger, bumping into an email sent by Kibkalo, which would end up leading them to recover messages sent by the employee in which he shared details of Microsoft products.

In his correspondence with the blogger Kibkalo warned him about the leaks knowing that he was doing something illegal The former employee also told him it described his plan to break into building 9 on the Redmond campus and copy a server. The latter was not carried out but now he will face the rest of the charges against him in the United States.

Via | ZDNet > seattlepi.com