Ex Microsoft staffer arrested for allegedly stealing Win 8 trade secrets

"Alex Kibkalo, a former senior architect at Microsoft who most recently served as a director of product management in 5nine Software (according to his LinkedIn profile), has been arrested for allegedly stealing Windows-related trade secrets while working for Microsoft.

Kibkalo was arrested on Wednesday, according to a report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

According to a complaint filed on March 17 in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, Kibkalo -- a Russian national and former Microsoft employee based in Lebanon -- passed on trade secrets involving Windows 8 to an unnamed technology blogger in France.

Microsoft's own investigation found that Kibkalo "uploaded proprietary software including prerelease 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." Kibkalo is then said to have provided the blogger with links to the file on his account.

The unnamed blogger was "known to those in the Microsoft blogging community for posting screenshots of prerelease versions of the Windows operating system," according to the complaint. This person also posted information to his own Web sites and on Twitter, according to the document. Kibkalo was found by Microsoft to have elicited assistance from an acquaintance in Washginton state to set up a virtual machine on a server to help distribute the data and products, the complaint said."