Former Microsoft Employee in Hot Water for Allegedly Leaking Windows 8 Trade Secrets

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

An ex-Microsoft worker is accused of sending confidential Windows information to a French blogger

One of Microsoft's former employees has been arrested and ordered held without bail for allegedly leaking Windows 8 trade secrets to a French blogger, court documents revealed today. His name is Alex Kibkalo and he used to work for the Redmond outfit in Lebanon and Russia. Prosecutors in the case claim that Kibkalo provided the blogger with confidential Microsoft documents, including screenshots of unreleased versions of Windows.
Microsoft's main beef here doesn't appear to be that Kibkalo supplied screen captures to the blogger, who then posted them online for all the Internet to see. The bigger issue is that of allegedly sharing "proprietary and confidential trade secrets," including actual code, via email to the blogger's Hotmail account, The Register reports.
According to court documents, Kibkalo shared Microsoft's Activation Server Software Development Kit (SDK) along with unreleased versions of Windows Live Messenger. The documents point out that having access to the SDK could allow a hacker to reverse engineer the code that's put in place to protect against piracy.
Kibkalo was in Lebanon at the time the alleged leak took place. Based on the findings of an internal investigation by Microsoft and that of the FBI, it's believed that Kibkalo used a virtual machine on a Microsoft server to send the files from a mail.ru account. It's also said that the two talked about the illegal exchange on MSN chat.
Why do it, if in fact he's found guilty? Investigators believe he was motivated by a poor performance review he received after having been employed at Microsoft for 7 years.
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