Elliot Doxer: Akamai Employee Arrested for Wire Fraud

by Jordan Yerman | October 6, 2010 at 02:17 pm

1768 views | 0 Recommendations | 0 comments

Akamai Employee Elliot Doxer Arrested in Attempted Espionage

Elliot Doxer, who works for CDN (content delivery network) heavyweight Akamai, was arrested by US federal agents on charges of wire fraud. Elliot Doxer is accused of offering to spy for an currently-unnamed foreign country in exchange for $3,000.

US law enforcement officials posed as representatives of that country in exchanging information for cash with Elliot Doxer, who was then arrested. Akamai has been cooperating with the investigation.

CDNs such as Akamai distribute traffic to popular and bandwidth-heavy sites across servers located all over the world, so that you hit a server close to your geographical location. This keeps overall site performance optimal.

CDN usage is an aspect of "cloud computing", which means that information is not held locally by client companies, but distributed physically across servers not under their direct control.

Authorities said Doxer sent an e-mail to the foreign country's consulate in June 2006, and offered to provide any information he had access to in order to help that country in exchange for $3,000.