An ex-employee of Microsoft Corp has been arrested and filed charges of stealing the firm's trade secrets to a blogger in France, Bloomberg said. According to the criminal complaint filed by US prosecutors, Russian national Alex Kibkalo admitted to the software maker's investigators that he provided confidential information to the blogger, which include a program that protects against copyright infringement. The lawsuit was filed against Kibkalo following his arrest yesterday. Kibkalo's actions would most likely fall under the Economic Espionage Act of 1996, of which the Cornell University Law School defined as the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret with the intention that the offense could benefit a foreign entity. He will not be able to post bail, according to federal court filings in Seattle.
The discovery of the theft was revealed by an unnamed person, who told Microsoft in 2012 that he had been contacted by the blogger to help the latter review the code for the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit, Bloomberg said. According to the complaint, the Kit is a product that was developed by Microsoft for in-house use only. Prosecutors were quoted as saying that the probe into the trade secret leak led to Kibkalo, who had been working for Microsoft for seven years as a software architect in Lebanon.
When Bloomberg contacted Russell Leonard, a federal public defender who was assigned on Kibkalo's case, the lawyer had not responded immediately to the news agency's phone message yesterday after business hours.
Washington-based advocacy organization The Center for Responsible Enterprise & Trade had released a study on the economic effects of the trade-secret thefts. The study of the interest group, which is led by former Microsoft Deputy General Counsel Pamela Passman, identified that one of the potential misappropriators of trade secrets are malicious insiders, or personnel who are employed or connected with an entity or its affiliate. Other misappropriators identified in the study are nation states, competitors, transnational organized crime and activist hackers.
