The story of how much of Windows 8 information was leaked a few years back is coming into clarity after the individual responsible for leaking much of the content has been arrested. Alex Kibkalo is stated to have leaked the goods to a blogger who is widely believed to be French blogger, Canouna, and it was the this person who tipped off Microsoft, accidently, after emailing the company to determine if the code was legitimate at which point, Microsoft accessed the bloggers email and found the source of the leaks.
It seems a bit obvious that if you are dealing with leaked content that you got directly from a source, you should not verify it with Microsoft using the same account that is owned by Microsoft to determine authenticity.
Of course, Microsoft snooping through the email account of the blogger does raise a few questions about privacy but at this point, when using a company’s service, it’s hard not to anticipate that they have the ability to read all of your emails/messages no matter the vendor. Especially when it comes to their own IP being leaked, you can bet that they will go to any measure to make sure their code is protected.
The court documents detail that Microsoft was not all that upset about the screenshots of Windows 8 being leaked but it was when Kibkalo obtained information relating to the activation of Windows and wanted to find a way to bypass authentication. In short, he was helping to create a keygen for Windows 8 and that’s what Microsoft feared most.
Not surprising, really, sure they would love to keep Windows 8 features a secret but the leaks, while certainly not loved by Microsoft, do not directly harm the bottom line of the company’s income statement. It’s the keygen that Microsoft feared as a working keygen can be expensive to patch and could result in millions in lost revenue.
Further, Neowin is able to confirm that at the time Microsoft was going through Canouna's email accounts, he become aware of their actions. In conversations with Neowin during this timeframe, he became increasingly paranoid that Microsoft would uncover his source.
We reached out to the blogger to see if he would like to tell his side of the story and will follow-up if he wants to comment but he simply stated, "no comment" on the above information.
View: Court Documents
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