Ex- CEO Charged in Denial of Service Attack

Well that's one way to kill your business. The former CEO of Web 2.0 service company YouSendIt was indicted by a federal grand jury this week with four counts of mail fraud.

According to an FBI release, the indictment states that between December 2008 and June 2009 Khalid Shaikh, used the ApacheBench software program to launch against YouSendIt's servers. Each DOS attack temporarily rendered the servers incapable of handling legitimate network traffic and deprived YouSendIt's customers' use of the company's services, the FBI stated.

According to the indictment, when the company was established in 2004, Shaikh was one of YouSendIt's founders. He served as the company's chief executive officer until August 2005. He then served as the company's chief technology officer until he left the company in November 2006.

The maximum statutory penalty for each count of mail fraud is five years imprisonment, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250,000, plus restitution.

YouSendIt focuses on one function: sending large files you can't send via e-mail. Just about everyone has tried to send some file, maybe a bloated PowerPoint file with too many transitions and added sounds like a cash register ca-ching, and had it bounced back by an e-mail server. YouSendIt lets people send files up to 2GBs in size and tracks the delivery of those files to all their recipients. You fill out the e-mail address of the recipients, your e-mail address for the delivery notification, and upload the file or files.