Dive Brief:
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Following the massive DDoS attack in October, more than 14,000 internet domains dropped Dyn as their DNS services provider, according to data from Bitsight Technologies.
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To arrive at the number, BitSight analyzed a set of 178,000 domains hosted on Dyn before and immediately after the Oct. 21 attacks. The number hosted dropped by about 8% immediately after the attack. "The data show that Dyn lost a pretty big chunk of their customer base because they were affected by (Mirai)," said Dan Dahlberg, a research scientist at BitSight.
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The attack on Dyn affected Twitter, Etsy, Github, Spotify, Reddit, Netflix and SoundCloud, and others.
Dive Insight:
Determining the impact of a DDoS attack is difficult, so the Bitsight data is noteworthy because it attempts to put some numbers behind the attack and its after-affects.
Dyn was recently acquired by Oracle Corp. and has more than 3,500 enterprise customers. Its network drives 40 billion traffic optimization decisions each day, according to Oracle.
Despite the damage, DNS service providers are generally still much more reliable than in-house DNS, Gartner analyst Bob Gill said following the Dyn attack. Gill suggests businesses concerned about DDoS attacks ensure their critical websites rely on more than one DNS provider. Amazon Web Services, for example, rerouted its customer traffic away from Dyn to lessen service disruption.
Though its services were briefly hampered by the attack, Dyn is still one of the leading internet performance and DNS providers.
