Khalid Shaikh, co-founder and former CEO of YouSendIt, was indicted last week for allegedly attacking the company's servers repeatedly. The prosecutors claim that he used an Apache benchmarking program to launch the denial of service (DoS) attacks.

YouSendIt is a popular digital content delivery service based in Campbell, California. The company was founded in 2004 by Khalid Shaikh and Amir Shaikh and has since raised around $34 million in venture capital investments. The service was even used by the administration of the City of Los Angeles for sending large files.

Khalid Shaikh served as YouSendIt's CEO until August 2005 and then as its CTO until November 2006. Since leaving the company, the 32-year-old entrepreneur has worked as a consultant for Intel and in March 2009, founded a company called FlyUpload, which rivals YouSendIt.

The indictment states that between December 2008 and June 2009, Mr. Shaikh launched denial of service attacks against YouSendIt's servers on four different occasions. According to the evidence, the ApacheBench HTTP performance measuring program was used to flood the company's servers with more requests than they could handle.

"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 investigators concluded. Shaikh is facing four counts of mail fraud, each punishable with a maximum sentence of five years in prison, three of supervised release and a fine of $250,000.

"Hanley Chew is the Assistant U.S. Attorney who is prosecuting the case with the assistance of Legal Assistant Lauri Gomez, and Law Clerks Traci Lee and Lily Robinton," the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California and the FBI announced in a press release. "I'm very excited about being able to talk to a judge. They spin a very good story," Khalid Shaikh, who claims that he is innocent, commented for The Register.