Neowin has learned of shocking and potentially devastating news. It would appear that two packages are circulating on the internet, one being the source code to Windows 2000, and the other being the source code to Windows NT. At this time, it is hard to establish whether or not full code has leaked, and this will undoubtedly remain the situation until an attempt is made to compile them. Microsoft are currently unavailable for comment surrounding this leak so we have no official response from them at the time of writing.
This leak is a shock not only to Neowin, but to the wider IT industry. The ramifications of this leak are far reaching and devastating. This reporter does not wish to be sensationalist, but the number of industries and critical systems that are based around these technologies that could be damaged by new exploits found in this source code is something that doesn't bare thinking about.
We ask that for the wider benefit of the IT community that members and readers support Microsoft by forwarding anything they know about the leak to the Microsoft's Anti-Piracy department.
Update: Microsoft's Tom Pilla has confirmed the leak stating: "Today we became aware that incomplete portions of Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 source code was illegally made available on the Internet"
Please do not post any links/screenshots/hints or anything to do with the source code outbreak. Discussion is allowed but we will not condone people spreading this source code.
View: Microsoft's Official Response
View: Microsoft Piracy Department
This leak is a shock not only to Neowin, but to the wider IT industry. The ramifications of this leak are far reaching and devastating. This reporter does not wish to be sensationalist, but the number of industries and critical systems that are based around these technologies that could be damaged by new exploits found in this source code is something that doesn't bare thinking about.
We ask that for the wider benefit of the IT community that members and readers support Microsoft by forwarding anything they know about the leak to the Microsoft's Anti-Piracy department.
Update: Microsoft's Tom Pilla has confirmed the leak stating: "Today we became aware that incomplete portions of Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 source code was illegally made available on the Internet"
Please do not post any links/screenshots/hints or anything to do with the source code outbreak. Discussion is allowed but we will not condone people spreading this source code.
View: Microsoft's Official Response View: Microsoft Piracy Department
The article was posted at 14:22 EST. ZDNet posted at 20:10 PST, otherwise known as 23:10 EST. They posted it over 9 hours after we did.
The time shown in the comments on the story is where I have Updated the story. If you look on the main page you'll see when the story was originally posted which was hours before news.com/CNN/anyone posted it that have failed to mention us. The confusion may come from the time where i updated the post to include Microsoft's response which was some hours after this news first broke here. Sad the bigger news sites fail to mention Neowin.
So did we
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.