Companies will go to great lengths to preserve their trade secrets and keep the competition in the dark, even if it means crossing into the grey area of privacy breaches. According to a March 17 legal document spotted by Business Insider, Microsoft sifted through the contents of an unnamed blogger’s Hotmail account to figure out who was leaking sensitive Windows 8 information from the inside.
The report, which names Lebanon-based Microsoft employee Alex Kibkalo as the alleged leaker, detailed an investigation approved by Microsoft’s Office of Legal Compliance that rooted through the Parisian blogger’s email to trace the source of the leak. The investigation began after someone tipped off Steven Sinofsky, then-President of Microsoft’s Windows division, to some source code sent by the blogger that turned out to be part of the internal Windows 8 SDK.
