Verisign Team


    Recent posts by Verisign Team:

    Meet our #InternetOfficial Contest Judge and Domain Expert Michael Berkens

    • By • Getting Online

    We kicked off the #InternetOfficial contest on Monday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of .com and fuel up to 15 lucky entrepreneurs’ dreams to start their own business on a .com domain name. Now that you are well aware of how to enter the contest, we wanted to introduce you to the panel of judges who will be helping to choose up to five monthly winners (for a total of 15) and the final, grand prize winner over the course of the contest.

    Meet domain expert Michael H. Berkens! Michael is one of the most well-known and prominent investors and bloggers in the domain industry. He was awarded Domainer of the Year in 2009 and is a member of the Domain Hall of Fame. Michael has been quoted on the domain industry in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today and Bloomberg, TheRegister.co.uk as well as many other technology, domain and legal publications. His evaluation and development expertise has also been tapped in several of the highest profile domain sales and auction events in recent years.

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    Internet Grows to 284 Million Domain Names in the Third Quarter of 2014

    • By • Domain Names

    Today, we released the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief, which showed that the Internet grew by four million domain names in the third quarter of 2014. The total number of domain names across all top-level domains (TLDs) is now 284 million. This is a 1.6 percent increase over the second quarter of 2014. [1]

    Largest TLDs by Zone Size

    TLD by Zone Size Q3 2014
    Source: Zooknic, Q3 2014; Verisign, Q3 2014; Centralized Zone Data Service, Q3 2014

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    Verisign OpenHybrid™: An Essential New Approach to DDoS Protection

    • By • DDoS Protection, Security

    Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are a threat to businesses worldwide and the attacks are getting larger and more sophisticated.  The industry’s approach to protecting against DDoS attacks must change, and change fundamentally, to stay ahead of this growing threat.

    For too long, the problem has been tackled piecemeal, using isolated devices or services. But protecting against DDoS attacks increasingly requires communication and coordination between many components – from networking equipment, to specialized appliances and cloud-based services.

    A shift in security architecture is needed to an open platform where devices and services from different vendors can share and act on information in concert. It must be a hybrid platform, allowing on-premise routers and security appliances to detect and mitigate attacks locally, while automating alerting and switchover to cloud-based services if an attack threatens to swamp the business’ network connection.

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    New from Verisign Labs: What’s in your attack surface?

    • By • Security
    Recently, Verisign Labs researcher Eric Osterweil and Verisign CSO Danny McPherson, along with Lixia Zhang, a professor of computer science at UCLA, received the Best Paper Award at this year’s IEEE Workshop on Secure Network Protocols (NPSec ‘14) for their paper, “The Shape and Size of Threats: Defining a Networked System’s Attack Surface.” Below is a guest post from one of the authors, Eric Osterweil, principal researcher for Verisign Labs, describing the genesis of the research and future plans.

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    Domain Registrations: Is Bitcoin Going Mainstream?

    • By • • Domain Names

    Earlier this year we used Bitcoin as an example of how domain registrations could be an effective gauge of interest in a particular subject. Our analysis demonstrated a clear rise in the number of registered .com and .net domain names containing the term “Bitcoin” in 2013, as well as a positive correlation between increased registration activity and increases in the dollar value of bitcoin.

    In this post, we decided to take a look at the history of Bitcoin-related domain registration activity since 2009 to see if we noticed any other trends.

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    Taking the First Steps Online: It All Starts With a Name

    • By • Getting Online

    Guest Post from Richard Stevenson, 1&1 Internet

    For many small businesses and start-ups, the first steps to creating an online presence can be a daunting prospect. With so much information out there, knowing exactly what is best for your business can be a challenge. Richard Stevenson of 1&1 Internet, Europe’s largest domain name registrar, outlines the first steps for business owners interested in getting online.

    From choosing a hosting provider to creating a website, we know that creating a digital shop front can seem like it demands many steps with important decisions every step of the way, and that this can at first appear overwhelming.

    In truth it’s a great deal easier than many assume, but in order to make the process easier, why not focus on just the first step? Once you have that first incredible idea for a company or product, what follows is picking a name that will help you stand out. The digital world is no different, so begin by imagining what your website name would be.

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    Why the Butcher, the Baker and the Candlestick Maker are Now Online

    • By • Getting Online

    Guest Post from Emma Jones, founder of UK-based Enterprise Nation

    Traditional independent businesses that don’t regard themselves as having relevance in the digital world are finding growth by getting online.

    In the UK, an astonishing 50% of small firms are still not online. Enterprise Nation’s Go and Grow Online campaign, supported by Verisign, Microsoft and BT Business, has launched a 12-month programme of nationwide events to help the smallest firms get the skills and confidence to get their digital ducks in a row. Of course, small businesses can survive without a website, a Facebook page and a Twitter account – but how much could they grow if they took the plunge into cyberspace?

    We’ve taken a look at three very British trades made famous by an ancient nursery rhyme – “Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub” – that are increasing their trade and geographical reach simply via getting online, in addition to the traditional presence at a market stall or retail shop. And who do you think they are? A butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker…

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    New from Verisign Labs: Measuring the Leakage of Onion at the Root

    • By • Security

    If you are trying to communicate anonymously on the internet using Tor, this paper may be an important read for you. Anonymity and privacy are at the core of what the Tor project promises its users. Short for The Onion Router, Tor provides individuals with a mechanism to communicate anonymously on the internet. As part of its offerings, Tor provides hidden services, specifically anonymous networking between servers that are configured to receive inbound connections only through Tor. In order to route requests to these hidden services, a namespace is used to identify the resolution requests to such services. Tor uses the .onion namespace under a non-delegated (pseudo) top-level-domain. Although the Tor system was designed to prevent .onion requests from leaking into the global DNS resolution process, numerous requests are still observed in the global DNS, causing concern about the severity of the leakage and the exposure of sensitive private data.

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    Make Your Idea Internet Official: Your .com Is Waiting

    • By • Getting Online

    As you think about bringing your business online, look no further than .com, one of the most universally recognized domains on the internet. While .com is highly desirable for the businesses and individuals around the globe, did you know there are still millions upon millions of great .com domain names available for registration? Let’s take a look at the latest facts around .com availability, based on an analysis of .com domain name registrations as of July 2014:

    • 23 million times a day, a .com domain name availability check is successful [1]
    • Over 95 percent of five-character .com combinations are available
    • More than 99 percent of six-character .com combinations are available
    Even though there is an abundance of .com domain names available for registration, many experts recommend registering descriptive and keyword-rich names because they attract higher click-through rates on search engine results pages.

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