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Ex-CEO charged with attack on former company
YouSendIt battered by DoS attacks
By Grant Gross
Published: 18:04 GMT, 30 October 09
Khalid Shaikh, former CEO of YouSendIt, has been indicted by a grand jury on four counts of mail fraud after been accused of launching four denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against the company's servers, the US Department of Justice said.
Shaikh used the ApacheBench software program to launch the DOS attacks against YouSendIt's servers between December 2008 and June, claimed the DoJ.
Shaikh co-founded YouSendIt in January 2004 and served there as CEO and later CTO until November 2006. YouSendIt provides a service for sending and receiving large files over the web.
Each of the DoS attacks temporarily stopped the servers from handling legitimate network traffic and stopped YouSendIt's customers from using the company's services, the DoJ said.
The maximum penalty for each count of mail fraud is five years in prison, three years of probation and a fine of US$250,000, plus restitution if appropriate. However, any sentence following conviction would be imposed by the court after consideration of the US. Sentencing Guidelines and the federal statute governing the imposition of a sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 3553.
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