Verisign Team


    Recent posts by Verisign Team:

    Why the UK needs a Go and Grow Online campaign

    • By • Getting Online

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

    With almost 50% of small businesses said to be without a website and, of those that are online, only a few taking the opportunity to trade, Emma Jones of London-based small business network, Enterprise Nation, outlines the need for a campaign to help British businesses make the most of the web.

    When I founded Enterprise Nation in 2005 it was to help people turn their good ideas into great businesses. Now, by offering expert advice, events, networking and inspiring books, we have more than 60,000 members in the UK who are all looking to create thriving small businesses.

    When Enterprise Nation first started, Facebook was still in its infancy and Twitter hadn’t even been founded, which shows just how quickly the online world has changed! With over 2 billion people now online across the globe, the digital world represents a big opportunity for small businesses. Having a website to showcase your products and services is like having a shop window that the world can see into, at any time of the day (or night!). It’s never been so easy to launch online with template website providers, blogging platforms and social media. So why is it that so many businesses are yet to embrace the web and reap the rewards?

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    New from Verisign Labs – Measuring Privacy Disclosures in URL Query Strings

    • By • Security
    Have you ever gone to socially share or email a URL and found that it was much longer than you had expected? Take the following contrived URL as an example:

    http://www.example.com/path/submit.php?user=userabc&pageid=012345&utm_referrer=rss&localtime=+0500

    In your personal experience, as in our example, you might have realized that the URL was as much about you, the client, as it was about the web resource you were trying to access. Indeed, internet addresses may contain a wealth of information about the identities and activities of the users visiting them. URLs often utilize query strings (i.e., key-value pairs appended to the URL path; in our example, everything after the question mark) as a means to pass session parameters and form data. While sometimes benign and necessary to render the web page, query strings often contain tracking mechanisms, user names, email addresses and other information that users may not wish to publicly reveal. In isolation this is not particularly problematic, but the growth of web 2.0 platforms such as social networks and micro-blogging means such URLs are increasingly being publicly broadcast.

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    The Evolving Threat of Amplification DDoS Attacks

    • By • DDoS Protection, Security

    If there is one trend in the cybersecurity world over the last 12 to 18 months that cannot be ignored, it is the increasing prevalence and destructive power of amplification-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.

    An amplification attack is a two-part DDoS attack that generally uses the User Datagram Protocol (UDP). An attacker first sends a large number of small requests to unsuspecting third-party servers on the internet. The attacker crafts these requests to result in large responses, but they are otherwise normal except that their source addresses are rewritten (spoofed) so they appear to have come from the victim instead of the attacker. When all the third-party servers send their large responses to the victim, the resulting amount of traffic is much more than the attacker could have generated alone. These attacks often overwhelm the resources of the victim, as attacks in the hundreds of gigabits per second (Gbps) are possible using this method.

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    Almost Half of Companies Lack DDoS Response Plans

    • By • DDoS Protection, Security

    It’s tempting to see the threat of distributed denial of service (DDoS) as noise in the background of cybersecurity discussions, but don’t be fooled. Any risk to your critical web infrastructure can have a severe impact to your business, and given that the frequency, scale and sophistication of these types of attacks are increasing, the threat is very real.

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    Introducing getdns: a Modern, Extensible, Open Source API for the DNS

    • By • Security

    Verisign is pleased to announce the public introduction of getdns at The Next Web in Amsterdam (TNWEurope) April 23-24, 2014. Verisign Labs and NLNet Labs in collaboration have developed getdns, an open source implementation of the getdns-api application programming interface (api) specification.

    At The Next Web, getdns is one of the challenge APIs in a 36-hour Hack Battle. Multiple teams of application coding experts are using getdns to develop innovative applications that leverage the global security infrastructure available through DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC).

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    Internet Grows to 271 Million Domain Names in the Fourth Quarter of 2013

    • By • Domain Names

    Today, Verisign announced five million domain names were added to the internet in the fourth quarter of 2013, bringing the total number of registered domain names to 271 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Dec. 31, 2013, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief. The increase of five million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 1.9 percent over the third quarter of 2013. Worldwide registrations have grown by 18.5 million, or 7.3 percent, year over year.

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