The feds weren't kidding about cracking down on cybercrime. The former chieftain of Orbit Communication has made the FBI's most-wanted list.
In August, a federal grand jury indicted Saad "Jay" Echouafni, 37, the former chief executive of Sudbury, Mass.-based Orbit Communication Corp., on charges of hiring the hackers to take down the Web sites of weaknees.com, a large television services company that was a competitor to Orbit. The attacks, FBI investigators said, made the company's Web site temporarily unavailable, as well as the Web sites for Amazon.com and the Department of Homeland Security. The attacks caused more than $2 million in damage, prosecutors said.
Echouafni was indicted in late August by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles in the case, under a federal probe known as Operation Cyberslam, the FBI said. That probe began a year earlier after a large digital video recorder vendor in Los Angeles, weakknees.com, reported a series of denial of service attacks stopping its business for almost two weeks, the FBI added.
The attacks interrupted Amazon.com and other private and government Web sites, the bureau added.
Echouafni was for conspiracy and causing damage to protected computers, the Justice Department said in late August, when the case became known as part of a new crackdown on cybercrime called Operation Web Snare. He and a partner are accused of hiring hackers in Arizona, Louisiana, and Ohio hackers to hit Orbit's online competitors.
Echouafni remains at large, and the FBI has asked anyone who may have seen him to contact either the bureau or any American embassy, especially given Echouafni is Moroccan by birth.
