Ex-Microsoft Employee Charged With Trade Secret Theft

A former Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) employee was charged with stealing the software maker’strade secrets, including of a program to protect against copyright infringement, and leaking them to a blogger in France.

Alex Kibkalo, a Russian national, was arrested yesterday and ordered held without bail, according to federal court filings in Seattle. He admitted to Microsoft’s investigators that he provided the confidential information to the blogger, according to the criminal complaint filed by U.S. prosecutors.

Microsoft was alerted to the theft in 2012 by an individual, who asked that his identity wouldn’t be disclosed and who had been contacted by the blogger to help examine code for the Microsoft Activation Server Software Development Kit, a product developed for internal Microsoft use only, according to the complaint.

The company’s internal investigation traced the leaked information to Kibkalo, a seven-year employee who was working as a software architect in Lebanon, prosecutors said.

Read more here.