How a Bookmaker and a Whiz Kid Took On a DDOS-based Online Extortion Attack

Facing an online extortion threat, bookmaker Mickey Richardson bet his Web-based business on a networking whiz from Sacramento who first beat back the bad guys, then helped the cops nab them.

Confusion and stress reigned. Richardson called Lyon again. This time, Lyon agreed to help. "I was thinking this would be a big mess for me," he says. "But they had no one to turn to. I knew by Sunday I couldn't pass them off any longer." Lyon flew back to Sacramento and started working on the problem. He, too, had dealt with online extortionists before.

Sunday, July 21, 2002: Flashback: The Kid Who Saved Vegas Sports Books

From a low-slung building off of Flamingo Drive in Las Vegas, a company called Don Best delivers the ever-fluctuating odds on sporting events to most of the glitzy sports books on the Strip. All of this is done by computers, and late in the evening on July 21, files started moving around one of those computers by themselves. An employee working late called Don Best's general manager, Rick Allec, and asked him what to do. Allec told him to turn off the server. The employee couldn't, so he literally pulled the plug out of the wall.

Allec rushed to the office, and soon he was holding the printout of an extortion e-mail demanding $200,000. He replied—and stalled—just as Richardson would a year later.

The next day, a security consultant told Allec to call Barrett Lyon for help. "When Barrett showed up," Allec recalls, "I remember thinking, There's no way he can help us."

Lyon was 23 and looked at least that young. His blond hair offset a tan, handsome face. Allec says Lyon looked like he had given up a day of surfing to swing by and help out.

Lyon had never taken a computer science class. His degree from California State University, Sacramento, was in philosophy, applied law and ethics. And yet he was cocky about computers. Once, he bet some friends he could map the entire Internet in a day. They scoffed. He launched Opte.org and mapped the entire Internet in a day. (Sort of. The open-source project is ongoing.) "People have never worried about my background," Lyon says, "because when they ask questions, I can answer them."

He had to win over Allec quickly, since Allec's customers were irate. A sports book forced to turn away wagers is like a bank turning down deposits. "We were down for three hours at one point, which was absolutely unheard of in our business," says Allec. "But Barrett made me comfortable. He would say, 'They're going to do this next, and we'll fight it this way.' And every time, he was exactly right. It was almost eerie."