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File Sharing - Friday, October 30, 2009

Former YouSendIt CEO Busted By Feds For DOS Retribution

If the FBI's case against Khalid Shaihk holds up, the guy must be such a douche. He was indicted by a federal grand jury this week with four counts of mail fraud. According to an FBI release, the indictment says that from December 2008 - June 2009 Khalid Shaikh, launched four denial of service (DOS) attacks against YouSendIt’s servers. 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 max statutory penalty for each count of mail fraud is five years imprisonment, three years of supervised release and a fine of $250K, plus restitution.

YouSendIt is a web-based SaaS digital content delivery service. It lets users send, receive and track files on-demand. It is an alternative to sending large e-mail attachments, using FTP.

According to his Linkedin Profile he was CEO of YouSendit starting in January 2004 until August 2005 and then was CTO until November 2006 when he left to work on a variety of smaller job including as a Ruby on Rails consultant to Intel and Nvidia. He was also CEO and founder of YouSendIt rival FlyUpload for over a year.

YouSendIt is no scrappy startup. The file-sharing site has raised $34M from Alloy Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, Emergence Capital Partners, Sevin Rosen Funds, and Sigma Partners.

To be fair, Shaikh says he is innocent, however, he does have a prior [clarification: per a comment we do not mean to imply that he has a prior indictment]. In August, Mobile Crunch reported he had been banned from Apple's App Store after flooding it with more than 943 apps over a 250 day period. The publication claimed many of the apps were of dubious value.