The man who founded file sharing website YouSendIt.com has been accused of launching a series of denial of service (DoS) attacks on the site after leaving the company.

Khalid Shaikh has been indicted on four counts of mail fraud. It is alleged on four occasion between December 2008 and June 2009, he used the ApacheBench web server performance monitoring software to overpower YouSendIt.com’s servers, rendering its services inaccessible to customers.

Shaikh set up YouSendIt.com in 2004 and served as CEO until 2005 when he became chief technology officer. Shaikh left the company in 2006 to become an independent Ruby on Rails consultant, and he set up another file sharing site in 2007.

YouSendIt.com attracted the attention of US authorities in 2004 when it transpired that an alleged Al Qaeda member used the site to distribute materials. However, the company now counts the Los Angeles city administration among its customers.