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Press Release |
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VeriSign’s New Infrastructure to Strengthen and Diversify Internet
Tenfold Capacity Increase for .Com and .Net Domain Name Systems
Will Support Rising Consumer Demand for Internet-Related Activity and
Protect Against Serious Attacks on the Infrastructure
London – February 8, 2007 – VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN),
the leading provider of intelligent infrastructure for the networked
world, today announced a major initiative to expand and diversify the
capacity of its global Internet infrastructure by ten times by the year
2010.
Named Project Titan, the initiative’s aim is to increase
the capabilities of VeriSign’s infrastructure to manage the explosive
surge in interactions taking place as e-commerce, social networking
and Internet-enabled wireless devices place huge new demands on the
Internet while at the same time protecting against cyber attacks that
are growing in both scale and sophistication.
The Project Titan initiative includes the expansion
of VeriSign’s critical infrastructure both in scale and location and
investment in new engineering, monitoring and security systems to support
the growth in Internet traffic. Over the next three years, VeriSign
will increase its daily Domain Name System (DNS) query capacity from
400 billion queries a day to over 4 trillion queries a day and will
scale its proprietary constellation of resolution systems to increase
their bandwidth from over 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) to greater than
200 Gbps. In addition, by distributing its infrastructure to many more
locations around the globe, the .com and .net systems will have greater
redundancy and reduced latency, which will improve the experience for
users by reducing bottlenecks and increasing speed. State of the
art engineering enhancements to the system will also create increased
capability to track, correlate and pinpoint security and network related
events on a global basis.
“With the emergence of consumer-driven services and
the surge in web-ready wireless devices, the Internet we know today
is radically different than the one we knew just five years ago,” said
Stratton Sclavos, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of VeriSign.
“We must make sure that VeriSign’s infrastructure is ready to support
a new era of the Internet, the Any Era, where billions of users demand
anywhere, anytime, any device access to communications, information
and entertainment.”
Sclavos will go into greater detail regarding Project
Titan during his Keynote Address at 2 pm PT today at the RSA Conference
in San Francisco, CA.
Project Titan will strengthen the Internet infrastructure
to support the explosive growth driven by the emergence of next-generation
networks as well as web services and machine-to-machine interactions.
Industry forecasts suggest that growth will continue through 2010 as
the number of Internet users is expected to nearly double to 1.8 billion,
most of the 2 billion cell-phones will be web-enabled and tens of millions
of households switch to voice over IP (VoIP) telephony and IP television
(IPTV) services.
In addition to increased demand, these networks must
be fortified and in some cases re-engineered to address the growing
threats from new and increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. Security
vulnerabilities have increased 700 percent since 2000, according to
Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency Response Team and bandwidth
requirements on VeriSign’s infrastructure between 2000 and 2010 will
have increased by a factor of 10,000.
In 2007 and 2008 alone, cyber attacks are expected
to increase in size and scope by 50 percent each year, creating new
threats to economic and national security. These include incidents that
threaten our government, such as last year’s attacks that hacked government
websites, and attacks against commercial websites, such as the hacker
who used tens of thousands of hijacked PCs to launch denial of service
attacks that systematically disabled over 1,500 websites including major
Internet service providers. The scope and sophistication of attacks
have been highly volatile over the last five years – suddenly spiking
as new and more powerful tactics are discovered and deployed – and thus
VeriSign must consistently overprovision and adjust its security approach
to meet the uncertain nature of these threats.
VeriSign manages the critical infrastructure that
handles registration and resolution traffic for the .com and .net systems.
In doing so, VeriSign manages an average of 24 billion Domain Name System
(DNS) queries a day. A DNS query occurs every time an Internet user
clicks on a website, checks email or their computer applications utilise
the .com and .net infrastructures. This does not include the vast number
of computers that communicate with each other via automatically generated
DNS queries. VeriSign additionally operates the “A” and “J” root servers,
which serve as the central directory to route Internet traffic to other
top level domains.
The multi-year Project Titan initiative includes:
- Deployment of infrastructure into new regions. VeriSign intends
to accelerate its deployment of Regional Internet Resolution Sites to
over 100 locations globally by 2010. These RIRS extend the .com and
.net infrastructures across the world, which diversifies the systems,
increases stability and improves resolution speed for end users. These
widely distributed sites also direct region-specific DNS traffic to
certain resolution sites to enable more effective quarantining of malicious
traffic. VeriSign currently has over twenty regional resolution sites
deployed in countries such as Korea, China, Brazil, Kenya and Egypt
and will extend to locations such as India, Germany, Chile and South
Africa.
- Deployment of new network operations centers. VeriSign is building
additional network operations centers in the United States and Europe
to efficiently manage and provide increased redundancy for Internet
traffic. These sites will expand VeriSign’s data center capacity and
diversify its locations to improve Internet traffic management and counter
region-specific cyber attacks and threats.
- Significant expansion of existing infrastructure. VeriSign
is expanding its existing registration and resolution infrastructure
to manage the increasing demands on the .com and .net systems. By 2010,
VeriSign will increase by more than ten fold the number of resolution
sites (or points of presence) and more than double the number of registration
servers deployed. These servers run specialised software in fault -
tolerant architectures engineered by VeriSign to manage resolution traffic
and registration transactions at ever-increasing rates.
- Development of new technologies and processes. VeriSign is
developing next generation monitoring and response services that will
help better manage .com and .net traffic and better protect the systems
against cyber threats. The monitoring systems will rapidly diagnose
Internet traffic anomalies, which often appear in advance of a cyber
attack, enabling pre-emptive action to minimize impact. VeriSign will
also implement new DNS security protocols to better protect Internet
traffic.
“Fortifying and strengthening our Internet infrastructure
is very technical in nature, but its impact is not. Keeping the infrastructure
reliable and secure keeps our economy working, our communications seamless
and our government operations reliable,” said Ken Silva, Chief Security
Officer of VeriSign. “We believe that the Project Titan initiative is
an important part of keeping the Internet a trusted platform and tool
that we all rely upon.”
VeriSign’s current financial projections include the
costs associated with Project Titan.
About VeriSign
VeriSign, Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN), operates intelligent infrastructure
services that enable and protect billions of interactions every day
across the world’s voice and data networks. Additional news and information
about the company is available at www.verisign.eu.
Trademarks
VeriSign, and other trademarks, service marks, and logos are
registered or unregistered trademarks of VeriSign and its subsidiaries
in the United States and in foreign countries.
Copyright © 2007 VeriSign, Inc. All rights reserved.
For more information, contact:
VeriSign Media Relations:
Victoria Henry, vhenry@verisign.com
+44 (0) 20 8600 0723
Catriona Jackson, Weber Shandwick, VerisignLondon@webershandwick.com
+44 (0) 20 7 067 0289
VeriSign Investor Relations: Ken Bond, kbond@verisign.com,
001 650.426.3744
Statements in this announcement other than historical
data and information constitute forward-looking statements within the
meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E
of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements involve risks
and uncertainties that could cause VeriSign's actual results to differ
materially from those stated or implied by such forward-looking statements.
The potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, the uncertainty
of future revenue and profitability and potential fluctuations in quarterly
operating results due to such factors as the inability of VeriSign to
successfully deploy and expand the technology referenced herein, to
successfully develop and market new products and services, and customer
acceptance of any new products or services, including the products and
services mentioned herein; the possibility that VeriSign’s announced
new services and technology may not result in additional customers,
profits or revenues; and increased competition and pricing pressures.
More information about potential factors that could affect the company's
business and financial results is included in VeriSign's filings with
the Securities and Exchange Commission, including in the company's Annual
Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2005 and quarterly
reports on Form 10-Q. VeriSign undertakes no obligation to update any
of the forward-looking statements after the date of this press release.
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