Oracle to buy Dyn

The announcement comes a month after the October 21 cyberattack against Dyn that took down popular websites managed by the Manchester, N.H. -based firm.

Dyn provides backbone support for many popular services online, including traffic management and online domain registration.

Corporate IT spending growth is minimal, and a growing portion of the money that is being spent is going to hungry upstarts and cloud app and service providers.

Oracle’s co-founder Larry Ellison stated in the company’s annual developer conference held in September that it would move aggressively into the market, challenging Amazon’s leadership in businesses where Oracle barely registers now.

On 21 October, Dyn said its server infrastructure was the target of a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that impacted its Managed Domain Name Servers (DNS) customers, which hit the east coast of the USA hardest. Oracle said the acquisition was a natural expansion of its existing cloud computing platform, and one that will help customers optimize infrastructure costs, maximize application and Web site revenue, and manage risk.

Oracle, has also not been immune to breaches in its own systems.

The deal between Oracle and Dyn comes at an interesting time in light of another big piece of M&A that is still in progress.

Oracle didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The attack on Dyn by the Mirai botnet disrupted a large part of the internet in the United States and Europe.

The name Dyn might sound familiar.

In the attack on Dyn, hackers apparently commandeered an army of poorly secured internet-connected cameras and other “smart” devices and commanded them to overwhelm the company’s servers.

Dyn, whose customers include Netflix Inc, Twitter Inc and Pfizer Inc, was crippled by high-profile cyber attacks last month.

Founded in 1998, Dyn says that eight of the top 10 internet services / retail companies in the Fortune 500 use its services. The attack led to the blockage of more than 1200 websites. However, Dyn customers might want to be cautious about adding new Dyn services, as it’s likely that some current offerings might be removed from the mix. Dyn now has several hundred employees.

In May, Dyn announced that it has secured $50 million in funding from Pamplona Capital Management, a private equity firm with offices in NY and London.

Bessemer Venture Partners stands to gain from LifeLock’s acquisition after leading a $4.5 million Series A for the company in 2006.