Service providers face a unique and growing cybersecurity challenge today: they are frequently targets for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. These attacks often occur when their customers are targeted, but service providers are also directly attacked because they are commonly critical infrastructure in their own right. From hosting providers handling thousands of websites to SaaS platforms serving millions of users, service providers must defend both their own infrastructure and the services that they provide to their customers.
Our DDoS attack data from the first half of 2025 highlights the magnitude of the problem for service providers. DigiCert’s UltraDDoS Protect service detected and successfully mitigated over 15,260 attacks during this period, preventing an estimated 7,504 hours of potential downtime. Notably, 19.56% of these attacks targeted the IT and Technical Services sector, 14.59% were against Communications Service Providers, and 3.95% were aimed at Software and Web Services. Altogether, these service providers accounted for 38.1% of all attacks, demonstrating the frequency of attacks that these organizations face.
Understanding why DDoS attackers target service providers, the increased impact of attacks against unprotected providers, the unique challenges these organizations face in defense, and the effective mitigation strategies available to them is essential for any business operating in the service provider ecosystem.
Why Attackers Target Service Providers
Service Providers have a Large and Diverse Customer Base
Service providers often serve a highly diverse range of industries. For instance, a single hosting provider might support e-commerce websites, financial platforms, healthcare applications, and government portals—all on the same infrastructure. This approach offers significant benefits, including cost savings, simplified IT management, and faster implementation.
However, a less-discussed downside of this approach is the shared risk pool that it creates. When one customer becomes the target of a DDoS attack, the ripple effects can potentially impact all tenants on the same infrastructure. Additionally, the “law of large numbers” comes into play: the larger a provider’s customer base, the more likely they are to face frequent DDoS attacks, simply because there’s always a chance someone is targeting one of their customers.
Shared Resource Architecture and Oversubscription
Many service providers use an oversubscription model to maximize efficiency and reduce costs by sharing resources among multiple customers. This assumes that not all users will fully utilize their allocated resources at the same time. For example, cloud providers rely on multi-tenant setups where computing, storage, and network resources are shared, while hosting providers run multiple websites on shared servers. While this strategy optimizes resources and lowers expenses, it introduces risks. Sudden spikes in demand can push systems beyond capacity, leading to performance issues.
DDoS attacks exploit this vulnerability by overwhelming shared resources with malicious traffic, causing overcapacity and disrupting legitimate user activity. When a DDoS attack overwhelms an oversubscribed system, the result is slow performance, outages, and frustrated customers. These challenges highlight the importance of robust DDoS mitigation strategies and finding a balance between cost-efficiency and maintaining sufficient capacity to handle unexpected demand.
Service Providers are High-Value Targets with Reputation Risks
Service providers operate in a challenging environment, facing unique reputational and regulatory pressures that make them prime targets for extortion and competitive attacks. Their business models rely heavily on customer trust, consistent service delivery, and a reputation for reliability. For many providers, even a single well-publicized service outage can have significant consequences, triggering customer defections, eroding trust, and undoing years of reputation building. The cost of rebuilding that trust can be immense, both financially and operationally.
Attackers are acutely aware of this dynamic and often exploit it to their advantage. DDoS-for-hire services, which are relatively inexpensive and widely accessible, frequently target service providers with the implicit or explicit threat of sustained attacks unless a ransom or payment is made. These threats are not empty; prolonged attacks can disrupt services, generate negative media coverage, and result in substantial financial losses. For service providers, the reputational and operational costs of continuous attacks can be so severe that they may feel compelled to comply with the demands to preserve their business and customer base. This creates a troubling precedent, as attackers see these extortion attempts as economically viable, potentially encouraging more frequent and sophisticated attacks in the future.
Attacks Erode Service Provider Margins
Providers often prioritize cost-efficiency, which can limit their ability to maintain excess capacity or invest in advanced DDoS defenses. This focus on reducing costs often leaves systems vulnerable, exacerbating the problem when attacks occur. Many providers operate on tight margins, making it difficult to allocate resources toward proactive measures like advanced mitigation technologies or extensive network redundancies.
The financial impact of DDoS attacks can be severe and multifaceted. Direct costs include implementing security measures, upgrading infrastructure to handle higher traffic loads, and purchasing additional bandwidth to mitigate disruptions. These investments can quickly strain budgets, especially for smaller organizations. Indirect costs, on the other hand, can be even more damaging over the long term. Reputational damage from a successful attack can lead to customer churn, as users lose confidence in an organization’s ability to protect their data and maintain services. Legal issues may arise from service-level agreement (SLA) breaches or failure to meet compliance standards, potentially resulting in fines and lawsuits. Additionally, productivity losses can stack up as internal teams scramble to address the attack, diverting focus and resources away from key business operations.
Prolonged disruptions not only erode customer trust but also create significant financial and operational challenges. For businesses that rely on continuous uptime, such as SaaS e-commerce platforms, streaming services, or financial institutions, even a few hours of downtime can result in substantial direct revenue losses. And the ripple effect of a single DDoS attack can extend far beyond the immediate incident, highlighting the critical importance of investing in comprehensive defense strategies.
DigiCert’s Experience: Even DNS Service Providers Face Attacks
Even at DigiCert, we routinely experience attacks against our UltraDNS infrastructure. On average, we face between 100 and 300 attacks every month, ranging from minor probing attempts to significant, large-scale attacks. DNS providers face unique and mounting challenges because they represent critical infrastructure for internet functionality: most online services simply will not work without DNS availability. This makes DNS a key target for attackers seeking to cause widespread disruption. Successful attacks against DNS services can render websites, applications, and even entire networks inaccessible, even if the underlying servers and systems remain fully operational. Since DNS acts as the backbone of most online connectivity, any disruption to its services can create ripple effects that impact millions of users.
The centralized nature of DNS services and their critical role in enabling internet communication make them high-value targets for attackers who are looking to maximize damage. As the frequency and sophistication of these attacks continue to grow, the need for robust and reliable protection has never been more urgent. Recognizing this, we developed our own advanced DDoS mitigation infrastructure, specifically designed to defend against these threats. This system proved so effective in safeguarding our own infrastructure that we decided to offer it as a service to customers, providing them with the same level of protection against these increasingly common and disruptive attacks.
Service Providers That are at Risk
The service provider ecosystem encompasses a broad range of organizations, each facing specific DDoS-related risks:
DNS Registrars and DNS Managed Service Providers
DNS registrars play a critical role in managing domain name registrations and often offer basic DNS hosting services to their customers. These services are essential for translating human-readable domain names into IP addresses that computers use to communicate. However, attacks targeting registrars can have devastating consequences, as they can disrupt domain resolution, effectively taking websites offline even if their hosting infrastructure is fully operational. Such attacks can include DNS hijacking, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, or unauthorized access to DNS records. The centralized nature of DNS services amplifies the impact of these attacks, as a single successful breach can simultaneously affect thousands—or even millions—of domains, causing widespread outages and disruptions across the internet. This highlights the importance of robust security measures for registrars to safeguard internet infrastructure.
Web Hosting Providers
Traditional web hosting companies manage shared servers, virtual private servers (VPS), and dedicated hosting environments to meet the varying needs of their customers. In shared hosting, multiple websites are hosted on the same server, sharing resources like bandwidth, storage, and processing power. While this model is cost-effective, it makes the infrastructure more vulnerable to attacks, as a single breach or technical issue can impact multiple customers simultaneously.
Additionally, smaller to medium-sized hosting providers often lack the financial and technical resources necessary to implement sophisticated security measures, such as advanced DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) mitigation systems. This limitation makes them particularly attractive targets for attackers, who exploit these weaknesses to disrupt services, steal data, or cause widespread outages. As cyber threats continue to evolve, the need for robust security measures in web hosting has become increasingly critical to ensure both customer trust and uninterrupted service.
SaaS Providers
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies play a vital role in delivering critical business applications over the internet, enabling businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively. These platforms are integral to a wide range of industries, providing solutions for everything from project management and customer relationship management to financial planning and data analytics. However, SaaS providers face unique challenges as their customers rely on consistent availability to support core business functions. Even a brief disruption can have a ripple effect, impacting thousands of businesses simultaneously. For instance, a DDoS attack during peak business hours could severely disrupt operations across an entire customer base, leading to financial losses, damaged reputations, and diminished trust.
The growing reliance on SaaS platforms has made them a prime target for cyber attackers. Data from 2025 revealed that threat actors are focusing their efforts on industries that frequently adopt SaaS models. Financial Services, for example, accounted for a staggering 47.18% of all observed attacks. This sector includes numerous companies offering cloud-based financial management tools, payment processing systems, and online banking services, all of which are critical to daily operations. The concentration of attacks on these businesses highlights the need for advanced security measures to safeguard sensitive data and ensure uninterrupted service delivery. As SaaS adoption continues to rise, so does the importance of robust security frameworks to protect these essential platforms.
Cloud Infrastructure Providers
Major Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud providers like the hyperscalers form the backbone of modern internet infrastructure, powering countless businesses, applications, and services worldwide. These providers are known for their robust DDoS defenses, leveraging advanced technologies and extensive resources to protect their networks. However, their sheer scale and critical role in the global economy make them highly attractive targets for state-sponsored actors, hacktivists, and sophisticated criminal groups seeking to disrupt operations or gain unauthorized access to valuable data.
One of the unique challenges cloud providers face is the need to protect not only their own infrastructure but also the applications, data, and workloads of their customers. This dual responsibility requires constant monitoring and innovation to stay ahead of evolving threats. Multi-layered attacks, which simultaneously target the provider’s core network and specific customer workloads, pose significant risks. Such attacks can overwhelm traditional defense mechanisms, test the limits of current security tools, and lead to cascading effects across multiple businesses that depend on the cloud provider for their daily operations. This highlights the importance of continued investment in cutting-edge security measures and collaboration with customers to ensure comprehensive protection.
UltraDDoS: Layered Protection to Help Service Providers Keep Their Clients Safe
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.
