Today, we released the latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief, which showed the internet grew by five million domain names in the first quarter of 2014. The total number of domain names across all top-level domains (TLDs) is now 276 million! This is a 1.7 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2013. [1]
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.
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.
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.
One of the greatest strengths of the internet is seen when a customer in one country engages with a brand in another. The internet has enabled companies to grow in influence and reach customers far beyond national boundaries in ways that could not have been foreseen even a decade ago.
One of the few places where national boundaries are still apparent online though is in a brand’s domain name. By using a domain name tied to a country, such as one ending in .uk, .ru, or another country code top-level domain (ccTLD), a brand can signal to the world its country of origin.
This is great for a company that only wants to engage with customers in their home country. However, for a person attempting to access content from abroad, a domain name ending in a ccTLD may be difficult to remember due to its unfamiliar syntax. Companies seeking to connect with a global audience can’t afford to have the address for their digital storefronts be limiting in any way. For this reason, it is usually best to select a domain name extension that people are globally familiar with, like .com and .net.
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.
The world is abuzz with news of the United States government shutting down as of Oct., 1 2013. As we have seen with previous major news events there was a notable increase in domain name activity that seems to be correlated.
Domain name buyers are often among the first to react to huge international news events. We documented this earlier in the year by highlighting a notable surge in domain names related to the announcement of a new Pope.
The news this week about the birth of the new Prince of Cambridge to William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, is no exception. The Domains observed there has been a surge in royal baby related domain name registrations since the birth announcement was made.
It is no secret that there is a rush to register relevant domain names after any highly publicized event. We saw it with the Royal Wedding, the death of Whitney Houston and Hurricane Sandy. There are few events so widely publicized as the election of a new Pope, and as expected there was an enormous rush to register domains moments after the names “Jorge Mario Bergoglio” and “Pope Francis I” became known around the world. It has been estimated that well over 600 domains related to the Papacy were registered in the hours following the announcement.