A former Microsoft employee has been arrested for allegedly stealing trade secrets related to Windows 8, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Alex Kibkalo, a former senior architect at Microsoft, is accused of stealing Windows-related trade secrets while working for the company, according to a complaint filed on March 17 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. He allegedly leaked parts of Windows 8 to a French technology blogger in mid-2012, before the operating system was released, because he was reportedly angry over a poor performance review, according to the Seattle PI report.
Federal charges include theft of trade secrets.
Kibkalo, who worked for Microsoft for seven years, is also accused of stealing Microsoft’s “Activation Server Software Development Kit,” which prevents unauthorized copying of Microsoft programs. Kibkalo allegedly bragged to the blogger about previously leaking portions of Windows 7 prior to its release as well as breaking into Microsoft’s Redmond campus to copy a server.
After Microsoft found out the anti-piracy kit had been leaked, it conducted an internal investigation and found that Kibkalo “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” before providing the links to the blogger. When corporate investigators confronted Kibkalo, he allegedly acknowledged leaking “confidential and proprietary Microsoft information, products and product-related information to the blogger,” ZDNet reported.
Fahmida Y. Rashid is an accomplished security journalist and technologist. She is a regular contributor for several publications including iPCMag.com where she is a networking and security analyst. She also was a senior writer at eWeek where she covered security, core Internet infrastructure and open source. As well, she was a senior technical editor at CRN Test Center reviewing open source, storage, and networking products.