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1 WarGames
FLYING DOWN TO COSTA RICA, Barrett Lyon couldn’t wait to meet his new clients in the flesh. It was two days after Christmas 2003, and
the 25-year-old computer whiz from near California’s Lake Tahoe figured to be welcomed like a conquering hero. The early-morning flight banked away from San Francisco International Airport, piercing the winter clouds as it gained altitude. Barrett looked over at the pretty brunette by his side and felt he was on the cusp of a new and better phase in his life. BetCRIS—short for Bet Costa Rica International Sports—was not only treating him to the trip, it was paying for his girlfriend Rachelle Sterling to come along. It was their first plane journey together, and her first outside the country. He hoped it would go a long way toward easing the tensions of the past six weeks.
Barrett now realized he must have seemed irrationally obsessed with BetCRIS, defending an unseen company in Costa Rica against invisible enemies in yet another country. Most of the time all Rachelle saw was Barrett’s 6-foot, 2-inch frame hunched over the boomerang-shaped desk in their cramped Sacramento condo. For 20 or more hours a day Barrett stared blearily into the computer screens he used to track electronic assaults. He even blew off the family Thanksgiving he had promised her in order to pound out programming code. He had been too focused to thank her for bringing him the leftover turkey, let alone to explain everything he was doing.
To Barrett it was a battle for the ages, one that reminded him of “WarGames,” the 1983 movie memorialized in the poster on his wall. In the film, a bright but unschooled teen looking to play games online stumbles into a government supercomputer, nearly launching World War III. Barrett thought he had skipped the initial blunder and gone straight to the fun stuff, trying to short-circuit a cyber-battle that was costing real people their jobs and fortunes.
The previous spring, the first hint of a problem with the BetCRIS website hadn’t been enough to worry the company’s general manager, Mickey Richardson. Inside the seven-story building in Costa Rica’s capital, San Jose, behind the black glass that kept out the heat and the gazes of the curious, the phones were ringing as usual. But bets placed over the 1–800 number were a minority of the business. For more than a year now, most of the money had come in over the Web, placed by bettors in their homes and office buildings. Over that spring week, however, BetCRIS began hearing complaints that the Web pages were sluggish. “What the hell’s wrong with the site?” barked Mickey, who was usually nice when his money wasn’t involved. Technician Glenn Lebumfacil checked the logs and saw that while there was a crush of visitors to the website, they weren’t real customers. Personal computers from around the world were coming to BetCRIS.com and immediately leaving again. As to why, Glenn had no idea. The mysterious slowdown continued for days.
“Big deal,” Mickey said aloud. He could spend that much on a good night at the local sushi bar. Mickey paid. That was a cheap wake-up call, he thought. The next time might be more expensive. So Mickey phoned the most tech-savvy
people he knew and asked where they turned for defense. When he got to top oddsmaker Don Best Sports in Las Vegas, his business allies there couldn’t say enough good things about the kid from California who had saved them from a similar assault a year earlier—
an intense but affable surfer named Barrett Lyon.
Mickey called Barrett and ran through what had happened. Since the problem wasn’t dire—BetCRIS was up and running—Barrett gave him some free advice. He told Mickey to buy a couple of machines from a Massachusetts company that specialized in thwarting unfriendly Web traffic, Top Layer. Mickey paid $20,000 for the equipment, and Barrett talked Glenn through setting it up. “If this ever happens again, we won’t have a problem,” Mickey thought. Some months later, Mickey began hearing rumors from his cronies. New computer attacks were hitting the competition, and after some initial defiance, most of the offshore bookies were paying up. “These fucks are brutal,” one warned. “There’s no way to stop them.” A few
sites that didn’t pay got shut down for nearly a month. Their bank balances pummeled as gamblers turned elsewhere, and revenue vanished. A couple of sites never opened again, leaving angry bettors with no way to recover the money from their accounts and howling about fraud.
Mickey asked Glenn if the Top Layer gear was up to the challenge. “We should be safe,” his technician said. “I think our network is nice and tight.” Glenn had no idea how exponentially more powerful the bad guys had gotten in the past half-year. They had taken over hundreds or thousands of PCs for a “distributed” denial-of-service, or DDoS, so that the malicious traffic came from everywhere at once. The zombie computers could attack in multiple ways, while Top Layer’s equipment was designed to stop only a few basic methods. After Mickey failed to answer the attacker’s first email, a massive denial-of-service attack wiped out the Top Layer machines in just 10 minutes, crashing the BetCRIS site. The onslaught also wiped out Digital Solutions, the Internet service provider for BetCRIS and about half the other gambling companies in Costa Rica. Digital Solutions soon had no choice but to drop BetCRIS from its network, dumping the site into oblivion.
Barrett saw this as an enticing contest of wits and brawn, a chance to match his expertise against enormous might. There was also an ethical appeal. Barrett figured that since BetCRIS and its peers were legal in the countries where they were based—and since bookmaking companies in England were publicly traded on the stock market— they all were above board. Their enemies, on the other hand, were cartoonishly thuggish. “In a case if you refuse our offer, your site will be attacked still long time,” one wrote. It sounded so much like a joke that Barrett read the message out loud in the voice of Boris Badenov. But he knew that BetCRIS wasn’t smiling. For a Libertarian-leaning philosophy major, helping the gambling site was an easy call.
As BetCRIS went up and down, Barrett threw together what he could with the gambling firm’s hardware and that at PureGig, along with programming he wrote on the fly. His code diverted some of the bogus traffic, and he hunted by eye for suspect clusters of Internet addresses that he could block. But the hackers randomized the locations that their queries appeared to be coming from. They went after specialized computers at BetCRIS, including the routers and Web servers. And they acted more like real customers would, using software to download data-rich images that clogged the pipes while being harder to filter out.
Now the attacker knew that Mickey had been stringing him along, and he was genuinely angry. “I don’t care how long I have to destroy your business,” he wrote. If the grammar was poor, the message was clear. The day before Thanksgiving, the attacker turned up the volume well past what Barrett or PureGig had expected. When PureGig’s other customers started suffering, the company took Barrett’s operation down so they both could recalibrate. The enemy went after Digital Solutions as well, knocking off even the bookies who had paid up. Those firms leaned hard on Mickey to pay and stop bleeding them for his pride.
By the time of Barrett’s trip south in late December, the site was up most of the time. One of Mickey’s tormentors sent a final email, mocking him for losing so much business during the fight and spending another $1 million fending them off—more than they had sought in the first place. “I bet you feel real stupid,” he wrote. Factoring in
equipment, bandwidth, and fees to Barrett’s small company, Network Presence, the estimate was on the money, Mickey acknowledged to himself, but the assaults faded away. The intensity of the experience bonded all of the defenders together sight unseen, and Barrett felt like he really knew the guys at BetCRIS, that they were friends.
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