Barrett Lyon
| Barrett Lyon | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | 18 March 1978 |
| Residence | United States |
| Citizenship |
 American |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions |
Prolexic Technologies BitGravity Opte Project XDN Defense.Net |
| Known for | Security, Mapping, Content Delivery Network, Modern Art |
Barrett Gibson Lyon (born March 18, 1978) is an American Internet entrepreneur, pilot, and artist.
The son of a lawyer, Lyon was raised in Auburn, California. Although he initially struggled in school due to dyslexia, in middle school he became fascinated with computers. He soon found that the methods he used to overcome dyslexia allowed him to quickly gain an expert knowledge of computers. While in high school, he set up Linux servers to host webpages for friends and also managed his school's computer network. In 1995, while investigating a possible vulnerability in Network Solutions he accidentally caused AOL's website to go down for three days. After high school, Lyon enrolled at California State University, Sacramento and studied philosophy and photography.
Lyon is the creator of the Opte Project, which is an Internet mapping project that seeks to make an accurate representation of the extent of the Internet using visual graphics. The project was started in October 2003 in an effort to provide a useful Internet map with open source code. The project has gathered support worldwide and is part of the catalogs of the Boston Museum of Science and The Museum of Modern Art.
While working part-time in college for a small network security company, Lyon worked on defending websites against Denial of Service attacks. He soon decided to start Prolexic Technologies to specifically focus on defending websites against such attacks. His initial customers were online casinos which were facing extortionist threats from operators of Denial of Service attacks. After helping bring a Russian hacker to justice, Lyon's publicity allowed him to gain many new clients from outside of the gambling industry. He soon began giving talks about botnets and DoS attacks at industry meetings. Lyon eventually left Prolexic to start BitGravity. Prolexic was later sold to Akamai Technologies, a Content Delivery Network based in the Boston for $370 million.
...
Wikipedia