What’s Really New in the New gTLD Space?

• By • Domain Names

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:

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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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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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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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Interest in Bitcoin Reflected by Domain Registrations

• By • Domain Names

Bitcoin, the crypto-currency that has captured the imaginations of technologists and economists around the world, has received a considerable amount of attention over the past couple of weeks.

Recently we have seen how domain name registrations tend to surge in the immediate aftermath of global phenomena. The rise of Bitcoin also presents an opportunity to track global interest and investment by way of .com and.net domain name registrations.

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Verisign to Issue New Domain Name Industry Brief Beginning in 2014

• By • Domain Names

Today, Verisign announced that we are updating the Domain Name Industry Brief (DNIB) and a new version of the DNIB is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2014.

With the internet continuing to evolve in new ways, we have been evaluating how best to align the DNIB with that evolution so it better addresses the interests of our readers and expands the scope of the trends we’re tracking. We remain committed to continuing to provide informative content on the latest industry trends that are most relevant to our readers.

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