The FBI has detained the Russian programmer on tip Microsoft

In Seattle, yesterday, FBI agents detained Russian programmer Alexei Kibkalo on suspicion of divulging Microsoft's trade secrets.

A graduate of the Moscow State University, candidate of sciences Aleksey Kibkalo ( akibkalo ) worked at Microsoft for more than 7 years ( from May 2005 to September 2012), recently held the position of senior architect, responsible for technologies and virtualization projects in the MEA region (more than 80 countries). He has repeatedly spoken at technical conferences and is well known in the IT community. He is one of the ten most certified Microsoft specialists in the world. He participated in the development of many courses and exams in conjunction with Microsoft Learning. Co-author of Microsoft Press books. Founder and co-author of one of the most popular Russian-language blogs on TechNet.

In 2013, Alexey Kibkalo left Microsoft for 5nine, where he coordinated the development of management and security products for Microsoft Hyper-V.

Kibkalo is accused of transferring “Microsoft trade secrets” for publication to an unnamed French blogger, including the proprietary Activation Server Software Development Kit and internal Windows 8 builds long before the official release of this OS.

Microsoft officials told the FBI that Alexey’s activities “could have contributed to code reverse engineering” and circumvented Windows’s authentication mechanism.

They do not institute proceedings against the blogger, because he did not publish in the public domain practically nothing but screenshots, and it seems he even discouraged Alexey from “illegal” actions. Problems arose in September 2012, when a blogger for some reason sent an Activation Server SDK code to another Microsoft employee with a request to confirm its authenticity, although it could just send a hash. He immediately contacted the Microsoft security service, and she began an investigation. After examining the blogger’s mailbox on Hotmail, they found a letter from Alexei Kibkalo with links to hotfixes for Windows 8. It happened long before the release of this OS, when there were only rumors about it.

By raising the logs from their servers, Microsoft was able to restore the history of IM messages between Kibkalo and the blogger. There was enough compromising evidence in the correspondence to indict the programmer. In addition, Aleksey himself allegedly admitted in a conversation with Microsoft investigators that he was transferring some corporate programs and documents “to the side”. In September 2012, he quit or was fired from Microsoft. In mid-2013, the case was transferred to the FBI, and now history has taken a completely unpleasant turn.

In addition to the disclosure of trade secrets, Alexei faces the charge of illegally entering the territory of Building 9 on the Microsoft campus and attempting to copy the contents of the server.

The investigation against Kibkalo was probably conducted in secret. His latest TechNet official blog postjust a week ago . It seems that Alexei was immersed in the work and did not think that an investigation was underway.

PS Published court documents on Alexei Kibkalo