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Weasel” but insisted he was the right man for the job.

    Darren, like Dayton Turner, was one of the many natives of gambling-friendly Canada who made the trek to Central America. He was big, friendly, and a bit goofy. He didn’t carry himself with the same air of authority that Mickey and Brian did: Barrett found out later that his personal blog was titled “Big Dumb Kid.” Though he came off like an overaged fraternity boy, Darren ran a major company in the betting industry, one called Digital Gaming Solutions. Based in the same building as BetCRIS and often called Digital Gaming (to avoid confusion with Brian’s Internet access provider, Digital Solutions), it was one of the biggest sellers of software for gambling operations. Darren’s programs conducted the electronic equivalent of casino games, including virtual roulette and slot machines, along with sports betting and poker. BetCRIS was one of its dozens of customers, and Brian and Mickey were Digital Gaming investors. Barrett didn’t know it yet, but Darren had also been president of an older rival of Digital Gaming that had accused him of making off with its key software. Darren also had helped get another big Costa Rica bookmaker, BetonSports, off the ground.

    Mickey had already gotten Barrett together with some of the other extortion victims in town, and now he and Brian helped make those men into customers. Barrett, meanwhile, concluded that there wasn’t enough bandwidth in all of Costa Rica to absorb the attacks heading for the gambling sites, no matter how good he got at culling bad traffic. On January 12, he and Glenn Lebumfacil flew to Phoenix to set up a data center that would handle the Internet onslaught heading for BetCRIS and any new clients.

    When the plane took off, Barrett’s new company had one customer: BetCRIS. When the plane landed, it had a half dozen more, and Barrett had seventeen by the end of the first week. Even as Barrett was plugging in the computers, a San Jose bookmaker called VO-Group came under attack. The CEO tracked Barrett down on his cell phone. “How soon can you guys get going?” he begged. “I’m getting creamed!” Barrett realized there wasn’t going to be any more college for a while. He dropped out of Cal State Sacramento just a semester shy of graduating and took to sleeping alongside the computers in Phoenix until he had them in the shape he needed. Two weeks went by before he could get back to Sacramento for more than a night at a time.

    Barrett named his company Digital Defense International. After one of Mickey’s people complained that there might be copyright issues with that word, Barrett came up with Prolexic Technologies Inc., a play on the word dyslexic. A Google search on Prolexic yielded zero hits, and the word captured Barrett’s feelings that his dyslexia gave him an advantage, not a disadvantage. Barrett hired Glenn, Dayton, and a few others. Soon he needed more computing power. As a backup to the PureGig facility in Phoenix, which he knew from his Opte project, Barrett contracted for so-called domain name services from UltraDNS Corp., which managed the master computers that steered everyone looking for a site name ending in .org to the right numeric location. That proved a wise choice. In a final push, the hackers went after Barrett’s clients’ domain name servers in March 2004. After that onslaught failed, the hackers seemed to lose heart. On some days, their computers still sent thousands of times more hits than normal to BetCRIS. But the surges grew less and less frequent.

    Unfortunately for Barrett, the same focus that supercharged his technological guile also left him with a bad case of tunnel vision. For all of his dedication in pursuing the bad guys, Barrett remained shockingly naive about much in the business world, including the people he had chosen as partners. He didn’t stop to think how they had come to be in their positions atop a questionable world of expat gambling