Even after Dyn DDoS attack, businesses shouldn’t ditch DNS providers, analyst says

Dive Brief:

• Businesses should not dump their DNS service providers simply because of the massive DDoS attack on Dyn last month, says Gartner analyst Bob Gill in an interview with CIO. 
• Instead, Gill suggests businesses concerned about DDoS attacks ensure their critical websites rely on more than one DNS provider.
• The attack on Dyn affected Twitter, Etsy, Github, Spotify, Reddit, Netflix and SoundCloud, among others.

Dive Insight:

DNS service providers are generally still much more reliable than in-house DNS, Gill said. So instead of dumping current providers, companies should instead ensure redundancy measures are put in place. 

Gill said at least some Dyn customers that used more than one DNS service were able to recover from the attack fairly quickly. For example,Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy said last week that AWS responded to the outages by shutting down its Dyn DNS use shortly after the attack started and rerouting the affected traffic to alternative providers. The move lessened service disruptions to its customers. 

Doubling up on DNS service providers can be expensive, but could be worth it. The publicity generated by the Dyn attack and the fact that botnet source code was made public means more such attacks are likely.

People evaluating the attack on Dyn still haven’t uncovered a motive.

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