Prolexic

In the early 2000s betting sites faced a blunt business model: pay up, or be knocked offline right before the big game. Barrett Lyon helped several of them hold out, and in 2003 founded Prolexic in Florida. The trick was to use BGP to pull a customer's traffic through Prolexic's own scrubbing centres, strip out the attack and pass the rest along. Joseph Menn tells the story in Fatal System Error (2010).

Prolexic grew into one of the major pure-play DDoS vendors, with banks and gaming companies on its books. Akamai bought it in 2014 for roughly $370 million, and the service still carries the Prolexic name in Akamai's catalogue — a rare acquired brand that wasn't quietly retired.