The Why and How of DNS Data Analysis
A network traffic analyzer can tell you what’s happening in your network, while a Domain Name System (DNS) analyzer can provide context on the “why” and “how.”
This was the theme of the recent Verisign Labs Distinguished Speaker Series discussion led by Paul Vixie and Robert Edmonds, titled Passive DNS Collection and Analysis – The “dnstap” Approach.
Internet Grows to 284 Million Domain Names in the Third Quarter of 2014
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
Where Do Old Protocols Go To Die?
In Ripley Scott’s classic 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, replicant Roy Batty (portrayed by Rutger Hauer) delivers this soliloquy:
“I’ve…seen things you people wouldn’t believe…Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those…moments…will be lost in time, like (cough) tears…in…rain. Time…to die.”
The WHOIS protocol was first published as RFC 812 in March 1982 – almost 33 years ago. It was designed for use in a simpler time when the community of Internet users was much smaller. WHOIS eventually became the default registration data directory for the Domain Name System (DNS). As interest in domain names and the DNS has grown over time, attempts have been made to add new features to WHOIS. None of these attempts have been successful, and to this day we struggle with trying to make WHOIS do things it was never designed to do.
Verisign OpenHybrid™: An Essential New Approach to DDoS Protection
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.
What’s Really New in the New gTLD Space?
As someone who has long studied trends in the domain name industry, the opening of hundreds of new gTLDs has intrigued me for quite some time on many levels. One question I found myself pondering was: Will new gTLDs create “new” naming trends or redundant domains across many TLDs? With more than 3 million domains delegated in the new TLD space there is now a corpus to study to answer this question.
The short answer is clear from these first two pie charts which illustrate the percentage of the second-level domains (SLDs) that were available in .com as of 12/15/2014:
New from Verisign Labs: What’s in your attack surface?
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.
Domain Registrations: Is Bitcoin Going Mainstream?
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.
Internet Grows to 280 Million Domain Names in the Second Quarter of 2014
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 second quarter of 2014. The total number of domain names across all top-level domains (TLDs) is now 280 million. This is a 1.4 percent increase over the first quarter of 2014. [1]
Summary of the Registration Operations Association Workshop
The first Registration Operations Association Workshop took place on Thursday, October 16, 2014, at the Los Angeles Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel. I’d like to thank the 64 people that took the time to attend and participate in the discussion, both in-person and remote.
I started the workshop with an introduction to some of the technical challenges being faced by the domain registration industry. Additional challenges were described by Thomas Stocking of Gandi.net, Tobias Sattler of United Domains and Peter Larsen of Larsen Data ApS, and James Gould of Verisign. After discussing the challenges, we had an opportunity to consider proposals for organization presented by John Levine of Standcore LLC, Thomas Rickert of eco, and Adam Newman of IEEE-ISTO. The remainder of the morning was spent discussing those proposals and other options for creating a forum in which all interested members of our community could meet for face-to-face discussions. I’m very happy to report that we reached consensus on an approach.
New from Verisign Labs: Measuring IPv6 Adoption
IPv4 is the common thread that has held the internet together since its very early years, and, thus, it is both the most
important and most widely deployed networking protocol in existence. As the world rapidly runs out of available IPv4 address space, there has been a major movement to transition the internet to the IPv6 protocol with its vastly larger address space.
The global internet community has shown a huge level of collaborative effort in driving this transition. Events like World IPv6 Day and World IPv6 Launch Day brought together organizations working across all levels of network connectivity to raise awareness of the ever-increasing need for this change. Held on Feb. 11, 2011, World IPv6 Day marked the beginning of the changeover process. Since then, IPv6 adoption has been a closely watched and increasingly important metric.