Former YouSendIt CEO Pleads Guilty to DoS Attacks

The co-founder of digital content delivery service YouSendIt admitted to launching a denial of service attack against the company's servers.

Khalid Shaikh, 32, served as YouSendIt's CEO from its creation in 2004 until August 2005. He then acted as its chief technology officer until November 2006 when he left to work as a consultant.

In March 2009, Shaikh founded a new company called FlyUpload which offered the same content distribution services as YouSendIt.

Eight months later, in Novermber 2009, the entrepreneur was indicted on four counts of transmission of a code to cause damage to a protected computer.

The complaint claimed that he used an Apache benchmarking tool to overload YouSendIt's servers with requests on four separate occasions between December 2008 and June 2009.

Shaikh pleaded guilty last Friday to one of the four counts. He faces a maximum of five years in prison followed by three years of supervised release and a fine of up to $250,000.

The program Shaikh admitted to using is called ApacheBench and is designed to test how many requests per second a server is capable of handling, an operation commonly referred to as stress testing.

"By intentionally transmitting the ApacheBench program to YouSendIt’s servers, Mr. Shaikh was able to overwhelm the servers’ capabilities and render it unable to handle legitimate network traffic," the US Attorney's Office said.

Shaikh was released on a $100,000 bail and is scheduled to be sentenced on September 29. He will also have to pay restitution if the court deems appropriate.

The type of attack Shaikh was accused of is known as denial of service (DoS) and is less powerful than the more common distributed denial of service (DDoS) ones which are usually instrumented with the help of botnets.

The Anonymous hacktivist collective is known to encourage its members to participate in DDoS attacks as a form of protest. As outlined by this case, such actions can have serious consequences.