YouSendIt Founder/CEO Jailed For DDoS Attacks

The Department of Justice issued a press release stating that Khalid Shaikh, one of the founding members and former CEO of YouSendIt, a popular file-sharing site, pleaded guilty to launching DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks from December 2008 to June 2009 on the company's servers located in San Jose, California:

Mr. Shaikh sent an ApacheBench computer code to YouSendIt’s servers. ApacheBench is a benchmarking program used for measuring the performance of computers known as web servers. ApacheBench was designed to determine the number of requests per second a server is capable of serving. 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.

This is again one of the more insidious type of cybercrimes, the inside job, that companies and enterprises have to keep their guards up for at all times. It's a tough crime to...ahem, "Shaikh"... as the former employees (in this case founder/former CEO/CTO) have intricate knowledge of the inner workings of most IT infrastructures compared to outside attackers. Let's hope less former employees go rogue. After all, the DoJ just pulled off a "YouJailIt."