CEO In Trouble: For Attacking the Firm He Founded

"Former CEO charged with cyberattack on firm"
SFGate, San Francisco Chronicle (October 30, 2009)

"Khalid Shaikh, former CEO of YouSendIt, has been indicted by a grand jury on four counts of mail fraud after allegedly launching four denial-of-service (DOS) attacks against the company's servers, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

"Shaikh allegedly used the ApacheBench software program to launch the DOS attacks against YouSendIt's servers between December 2008 and June, the DOJ said in a press release...."

That's a little more in the news articles, and the FBI press release. If any of the fairly reliable sources online mentioned motive, I missed it. There's plenty of ideas about why Mr. Shaikh DOSed the company he founded - many, in my opinion, of the "round up the usual suspects" variety.

Me? I think Khalid Shaikh had a motive: that this wasn't something that he 'just happened to do.' But what that motive was, I haven't a clue. And, happily, I don't have anything to do with the situation.

I hope YouSendIt comes out of this okay: which they should, with the publicity they're getting. (Hey! There's a conspiracy theory: This was a publicity gimmick - and no, I don't really think so.) The PC World sketch of their service, oversize email attachments, indicates that they were serving a specialized - and moderately uncommon - service.

In the news:

• "Ex- CEO Charged in Denial of Service Attack"
  PC World (October 31, 2009)
  • A little more background on YouSendIt

Background:

• "Former CEO of YouSendIt Charged with Denial of Service of Attack"
  Department of Justice Press Release, Federal Bureau of Investigation San Francisco (October 29, 2009)