3 ms·

Whoa .. there is a big story in here somewhere, which appears to have gone way over the head of the LA Times hack who wrote this regurgitated press release. He

Whoa .. there is a big story in here somewhere, which appears to have gone way over the head of the LA Times hack who wrote this regurgitated press release. He was arrested on criminal charges for running a simple benchmarking program? By the company he was formerly the CEO of? This is patently ridiculous, and can only be a case of YouSendIt having some major grievances with him about something else, or some other kind of ulterior motive. It seems only reasonable that he was running apache benchmark for curiosity, not with any serious malicious intent, and is now being held on some trumped up charges concocted by people out to get him. If anyone knows of an article that actually explains the relationship between YouSendIt and their former CEO, please link to it.

Aetius 15y ago
Umm, did you actually read the article? The former chief executive of the YouSendIt, a website where users can post files too large to send over email, has admitted to launching an online attack against the company he once ran. According to FBI investigators, from about December 2008 to June 2009, Shaikh sent an ApacheBench program to YouSendIt's servers, which measured the number of requests per second the site was capable of handling. Sending the program multiple times in essence amounted to a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS attack. No "curious" person would run apache bench on a website they formerly cofounded for 7 months.
powertower 15y ago
No. He POSTed the binary ab.exe to the website/service over and over ... using ab itself to do the POST.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  The article and the FBI statement are a little unclear, but I don't think that's what they mean. "Beginning in or about December 2008 and continuing through June 2009, 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." I have to think when they say "sent... to" they mean he directed the AB to make requests from YouSendIt's server, not that he posted it to the service. Otherwise the rest of the statement - "able to overwhelm the servers’ capabilities and render it unable to handle legitimate network traffic" - doesn't make any sense, unless someone can explain how simply transmitting the benchmark executable via the service somehow caused that. (As someone else pointed out, he could have used AB to /post/ AB to the servers... but I don't see anything in these articles to necessarily support that... and it would seem like the payload is less interesting than the transmission method.)
tomkarlo 15y ago
"This is patently ridiculous" ... how? The guy plead guilty to what was essentially a DOS (corrected from DDOS) attack intended to interfere with the company's ability to do business. Was it a really simple attack? Yes. But I'm not sure that's relevant. It's kind of like being caught trying to burn someone's house down and then claiming you were just testing to see if it was flammable.
- cheald 15y ago
  Minor nit - unless he was using an EC2 cluster or something, this would be a regular old-fashioned DOS, not a DDOS. It's something of a condemnation of YouSendIt's software and NOC that they weren't able to mitigate a huge number of connections from a single IP. Leveraging a botnet against someone is worlds apart from running a high-concurrency ab test.
  - tomkarlo 15y ago
    You're right... I was kind of assuming that it would take more than a single computer running AB to do this to any service of this size, but there's nothing in the article to support that.
- snowmaker 15y ago
  How do you know that he intended to interfere with the company's ability to do business? Sure, that's what the FBI said (channeled, presumably, from YouSendIt), but he could have just been running apache benchmark as a simple test to see how the server would respond. In fact, the allegation doesn't really make sense, because as the former CTO, if he had really wanted to interfere with the company's ability to do business, you'd think he could have found much better ways to do so. Logging in and deleting the company's data, turning employees/investors against them, or writing negative articles about them would have had a far greater consequence on their business than running an apache benchmark program. To be clear, I'm not claiming to know what happened; I'm just saying that this press release is a deeply one-sided view of the story, and that the situation smells funny.
  - 15y ago

Aetius 15y ago

Umm, did you actually read the article? The former chief executive of the YouSendIt, a website where users can post files too large to send over email, has admitted to launching an online attack against the company he once ran. According to FBI investigators, from about December 2008 to June 2009, Shaikh sent an ApacheBench program to YouSendIt's servers, which measured the number of requests per second the site was capable of handling. Sending the program multiple times in essence amounted to a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS attack. No "curious" person would run apache bench on a website they formerly cofounded for 7 months.

powertower 15y ago

No. He POSTed the binary ab.exe to the website/service over and over ... using ab itself to do the POST.

tomkarlo 15y ago
The article and the FBI statement are a little unclear, but I don't think that's what they mean. "Beginning in or about December 2008 and continuing through June 2009, 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." I have to think when they say "sent... to" they mean he directed the AB to make requests from YouSendIt's server, not that he posted it to the service. Otherwise the rest of the statement - "able to overwhelm the servers’ capabilities and render it unable to handle legitimate network traffic" - doesn't make any sense, unless someone can explain how simply transmitting the benchmark executable via the service somehow caused that. (As someone else pointed out, he could have used AB to /post/ AB to the servers... but I don't see anything in these articles to necessarily support that... and it would seem like the payload is less interesting than the transmission method.)

tomkarlo 15y ago

"This is patently ridiculous" ... how? The guy plead guilty to what was essentially a DOS (corrected from DDOS) attack intended to interfere with the company's ability to do business. Was it a really simple attack? Yes. But I'm not sure that's relevant. It's kind of like being caught trying to burn someone's house down and then claiming you were just testing to see if it was flammable.

cheald 15y ago
Minor nit - unless he was using an EC2 cluster or something, this would be a regular old-fashioned DOS, not a DDOS. It's something of a condemnation of YouSendIt's software and NOC that they weren't able to mitigate a huge number of connections from a single IP. Leveraging a botnet against someone is worlds apart from running a high-concurrency ab test.
- tomkarlo 15y ago
  You're right... I was kind of assuming that it would take more than a single computer running AB to do this to any service of this size, but there's nothing in the article to support that.
snowmaker 15y ago
How do you know that he intended to interfere with the company's ability to do business? Sure, that's what the FBI said (channeled, presumably, from YouSendIt), but he could have just been running apache benchmark as a simple test to see how the server would respond. In fact, the allegation doesn't really make sense, because as the former CTO, if he had really wanted to interfere with the company's ability to do business, you'd think he could have found much better ways to do so. Logging in and deleting the company's data, turning employees/investors against them, or writing negative articles about them would have had a far greater consequence on their business than running an apache benchmark program. To be clear, I'm not claiming to know what happened; I'm just saying that this press release is a deeply one-sided view of the story, and that the situation smells funny.
- 15y ago