The Complexity of Differentiating Normal Traffic From Potential Attacks
One of the fundamental challenges for service providers in mitigating DDoS attacks is the diversity of their customer base. This diversity means that each customer’s traffic patterns can vary widely, making it difficult to establish a clear baseline for what constitutes normal traffic. For instance, a surge in traffic triggered by a customer’s successful marketing event, product launch, or promotional campaign could easily resemble the characteristics of a coordinated DDoS attack. Such events can generate a large volume of traffic in a short period, leading to potential misclassification. This ambiguity complicates the process of distinguishing legitimate spikes in demand from malicious activity, often requiring advanced analytics, context-aware monitoring, and robust communication channels with customers to assess and respond to potential threats accurately. Consequently, service providers must adopt sophisticated strategies to account for these variability factors while maintaining reliable service for all clients.
Reducing False Positives in Mitigation
Service providers must balance robust DDoS protection with maintaining service availability for legitimate users. False positives in mitigation can block real customer traffic, causing disruptions similar to actual attacks.
This challenge is especially tough for providers with diverse customer bases and unpredictable traffic patterns. For example, an e-commerce site’s Black Friday surge, a news site’s traffic during breaking news, or a gaming platform’s launch event can mimic DDoS attacks to automated systems. Traditional methods like geo-blocking or naive rate controls are ineffective because the end users of these customers are highly diverse and dynamic.
Shared infrastructure adds complexity, as mitigation systems must differentiate between legitimate spikes from one customer and attack traffic targeting another. Overly aggressive filtering risks impacting innocent customers, while a looser mitigation policy leaves everyone exposed.
Scale and Resource Constraints
Many service providers operate with resource constraints that limit their ability to implement comprehensive DDoS protection. Smaller hosting companies, regional SaaS providers, and specialized service providers often lack the capital or technical expertise to deploy enterprise-grade DDoS mitigation solutions. These organizations are particularly vulnerable because they may rely on outdated hardware or piecemeal security measures that fail to handle the growing sophistication of modern DDoS attacks.
The economics of the service provider industry create additional challenges. Growth pressure focuses Capital Expenditures )=, leaving little room for significant security investments. Providers are often forced to prioritize operational efficiency and low costs over robust cybersecurity. Furthermore, customers themselves typically prioritize affordability and performance over security features, making it difficult for service providers to justify the expense of implementing advanced DDoS protection. As a result, many providers find themselves in a difficult position, balancing customer demands with the ever-growing threat of cyberattacks.
Multi-Vector Attack Complexity
Modern DDoS attacks increasingly use multiple vectors simultaneously to overwhelm different aspects of service provider infrastructure. Our H1 2025 data shows that while 70.22% of attacks used single vectors, 29.78% employed multiple attack methods simultaneously.
Service providers must defend against volumetric attacks that consume bandwidth, protocol attacks that exploit network stack vulnerabilities, and application-layer attacks that target specific services. Each attack vector requires different defensive approaches, and sophisticated attackers coordinate multiple vectors to overwhelm comprehensive defenses.
DNS Water Torture Attacks
Service providers face specialized attack techniques that exploit their infrastructure characteristics. DNS water torture attacks represent a particularly challenging threat for providers managing DNS services or hosting providers with customers using custom domains.
These attacks generate massive volumes of DNS queries for random, non-existent subdomains of legitimate domains. For example, an attacker might generate queries for randomstring1.example.com, randomstring2.example.com, and so forth. Since these subdomains don’t exist, each query requires recursive resolution attempts that consume significant DNS server resources.
The challenge for service providers is that these queries appear to be legitimate DNS traffic until analyzed in aggregate. Individual queries don’t trigger rate limiting or other protective mechanisms, but the cumulative effect can overwhelm DNS infrastructure and make legitimate domain resolution impossible.
Protecting Your Service Provider Business from Evolving DDoS Threats
Service providers are prime targets for DDoS attacks due to their shared infrastructure models, diverse customer bases, and high-value characteristics. With attackers continuously adapting and developing new techniques, service providers face evolving challenges such as DNS water torture attacks, application-level exploits, and the collateral damage of mitigation efforts.
The shift toward more precise, targeted attacks means providers must prepare for both traditional volumetric DDoS threats and emerging techniques that exploit application logic and protocol vulnerabilities. Investing in scalable mitigation capabilities, developing incident response plans, and maintaining clear customer communication are all critical steps for staying ahead of attackers.
To address these threats, DigiCert UltraDDoS Protect offers comprehensive, purpose-built protection for hosting providers, cloud platforms, SaaS businesses, and other critical infrastructure organizations. With always-on monitoring, expert-managed response, and massive mitigation capacity, UltraDDoS Protect ensures continuous availability for your customers while safeguarding your infrastructure.
Beyond defense, robust DDoS protection also offers a competitive edge. As attacks grow more sophisticated, customers will increasingly judge providers based on their ability to maintain uptime and security. Don’t wait for the next attack—contact DigiCert today to develop a customized protection strategy tailored to your infrastructure, customer base, and business needs. Stay protected and maintain trust in an ever-evolving threat landscape.
UltraDDoS provides purpose-built protection for hosting providers, cloud platforms, SaaS businesses, and other critical infrastructure organizations.
UltraDDoS Protect is the purpose-built defense against massive volume attacks, providing ultra-fast detection and mitigation on a global scale, delivering a high-capacity network with flexible deployment options so organizations can implement sophisticated traffic scrubbing across multiple vectors.
To learn more about UltraDDoS Protect, contact us today for a demo.
