In 2014, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks continued to be a massive concern for numerous Internet services. This was especially signaled by the Christmas Day siege of Xbox Live and PlayStation Network by infamous Internet mayhem crew Lizard Squad.

A survey by DDoS attack mitigation service Black Lotus shows that while DDoS attacks have become a common part of Internet weather, there is a disconnect between how threatened Internet companies feel by DDoS and how prepared companies are to mitigate them. One hundred and twenty nine service providers participated in the survey from a myriad of Internet industries amid them IT and network administrators.

The survey revealed that 35 percent of the providers surveyed suffered a DDoS attack one or more times weekly and only 16 percent indicated that they had rarely or never been attacked.

The year 2014 made a highlight of how many gaming services get hit by DDoS attacks, primarily because of the media-ready effect of consumers being out a game. However, the gaming industry isn’t the only industry on the Internet. In the Black Lotus survey the top three industries with customers affected by DDoS attacks are managed hosting solutions (MHS), voice over IP (VoIP) and platform as a service (PaaS).

Looking at the numbers 64 percent of PaaS providers, 56 percent of MHS providers, and 52 percent of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers had been impacted by DDoS attacks.

In the case of DDoS attacks, 34 percent of providers remove the targeted customer and 52 percent respond via temporary null route or block the customer until the problem dissipates.

To a large extent this means that the customer in this case—who may in fact be a consumer-facing service—is suddenly offline to consumers and as a result would suffer huge losses during the DDoS attack period.

The outcome: services affected by DDoS attacks don’t just lose money, they tend to lose customers. 85 percent of respondents indicated that DDoS attacks led to customer churn–meaning that keeping and maintaining customers in the current stormy Internet includes a solid DDoS mitigation plan.

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