Alta Vista Hacker Arrested - He's a Microsoft Employee

There has been an arrest in the Alta Vista hacking case, and the accused man, charged with stealing proprietary technology from their search engine, is an employee of Microsoft. Not only that, he has been working as a programmer on Microsoft's search engine team developing MSN Search. Microsoft recently announced its search engine will replace technology which Microsoft currently licenses from Yahoo!s Inktomi. The company is not charged.

Laurent Chavet worked at AltaVista and is accused of illegally accessing the California company's computer system in March 2002 and June 2002 and copying AltaVista's source code to his home computer. By then, he was no longer an employee and had not yet been hired by Microsoft. AltaVista was subsequently acquired by Yahoo!. The FBI affidavit alleges that Chavet claimed he logged in to look at the code because he was curious.

The obvious next question is, did any of the code make its way into Microsoft's search engine code?

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/181377_msftsearch09.html
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;808903836;fp;16;fpid;0
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/news/34958.html

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