site founder DDOSING?

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
The Register
30th October 2009

Federal prosecutors have accused a co-founder of YouSendIt.com of repeatedly launching web attacks against the popular upload site.

Khalid Shaikh, who was CEO and CTO of the California-based company until he left in 2006, used an Apache benchmarking program to flood YouSendIt servers with more traffic than they could handle, according to documents filed in US District Court in Northern California. Prosecutors allege Shaikh launched the denial of service attacks on four occasions, starting in December 2008 and ending the following June.

"By transmitting the ApacheBench program to YouSendIt's servers, Shaikh was able to overwhelm the server's capabilities and render it unable to handle legitimate network traffic," an indictment filed Wednesday stated.

Shaikh told The Register the allegations are untrue.

"I'm very excited about being able to talk to a judge," said Shaikh, who said he's 32 years old. "They spin a very good story."

Shaikh said he and a brother co-founded YouSendIt in 2004 and ended up leaving the company following differences with the company's investors and remaining executives.