An Israeli man faces federal charges for allegedly launching a cyberattack against Utah-based Overstock.com.

A grand jury this week indicted Kirill Alekseyevich Chudinov on one count of fraud and related activity in connection with computers. He pleaded not guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court.

Chudinov is accused of sending simultaneous inquiries from thousands of computers to Overstock’s web servers, causing $450,000 in damage. Known as a distributed denial of service attack, it is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources.

Overstock contacted the FBI last fall after its own investigation led it to Chudinov, according to a criminal complaint. The company found about 12,000 IP addresses associated with the same shopping cart user that were sending hundreds of requests a day. The connections were being made from locations around the world.

The FBI tracked Chudinov through an email account, linking him to an online article titled, “How to bring down every third site from your laptop.”

A Linkedin.com page shows Chudinov is an independent program development professional in Israel, according to the complaint. His profile on a Russian language social networking site lists his hometown as Zhytomyr, Ukraine.

FBI agents from Utah arrested Chudinov at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Aug. 6.

Source: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865636023/Israeli-man-allegedly-launched-cyberattack-on-Overstockcom.html?pg=all