Former Microsoft employee charged with leaking trade secrets

A former Microsoft employee has been arrested for leaking Windows 8 code to a blogger in 2012.

According to a court filing (.PDF), former Microsoft employee Alex A. Kibkalo allegedly leaked confidential information to a French blogger and urged him to spread the data around -- apparently in retaliation after receiving a poor review from Microsoft that year.

The court documents state:

"Microsoft's investigation revealed that in July and August 2012, Kibkalo had uploaded proprietary software including pre-release software updates for Windows 8 RT and ARM devices, as well as the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit (SDK) to a computer in Redmond, Washington and subsequently to his personal Windows Live SkyDrive account.... After uploading the SDK to his SkyDrive account on August 18, 2012, Kibkalo provided the blogger with links to the file on his SkyDrive account and encouraged the blogger share the SDK with others who might be able to reverse engineer the software and write 'fake activation server' code."

Kibkalo now faces charges of trade secrets theft, and has admitted to sharing the information. Investigators claim that emails were found within the blogger's Hotmail account which connected the former employee and blogger. The software architect also created screenshots of the operating system and posted them online.

Considering Windows 8 adoption figures and poor sales figures, the operating system has more problems to worry about than the leak of code.

Read on: The Guardian

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com