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Part of Microsoft source code for Windows leaked over the Internet

By Seattle times staff and news services

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Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla said some incomplete portions of Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 source code had been "illegally made available on the Internet."

One security consultant said the leak appears to be only a small chunk of the overall code.

The company was made aware of the leak yesterday, Pilla said. He did not know how many people might have gained access to it or when the leak occurred. The company also could not immediately say what the source of the leak was but said it was investigating. It also has contacted law-enforcement authorities.

Pilla said that there was no indication the code leak was a result of a breach of Microsoft's corporate network and added that there was no known immediate impact to Microsoft's customers.

Dragos Ruiu, a security consultant who looked at the code, described it as a hodgepodge of about 30,000 files, which is only about 2 percent of the overall source code of an operating system.

"It's pretty obviously not faked," said Ruiu, who organizes the annual CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, B.C. One big chunk of the leak, he said, is the underlying code to Microsoft Paint, a simple program that lets a user create and customize images.

The leaked material appears to be about 213 megabytes in size and expands to about 658 megabytes. Ruiu said he looked for, and did not find, critical components of the source code such as certain network protocols.

Still, he said, it's tough to identify how much of a threat the leaked code presented to Microsoft.

"There's a lot of files there," he said. "Everybody's trying to figure out what the impact of this is."

Microsoft has shared some source code with some U.S. government agencies, foreign governments and universities under tight restrictions.
 
But the company has generally argued that the blueprints to its operating system are proprietary and shouldn't be made public.

Still, because some people outside Microsoft have had access to the code, analysts said it wasn't too surprising a leak would occur, either intentionally or unintentionally.

"It seems unlikely this is going to create a material, significant security problem. It's more embarrassing than anything else because it makes it look like Microsoft can't control its code," said Rob Enderle, a technology expert and principal analyst with the Enderle Group.

Material from The Associated Press and Seattle Times technology reporter Kim Peterson is included in this report.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company