Posts Tagged ‘Verisign’
Friday, March 9th, 2012
 Nearly six million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2011, bringing the total number of registered domain names to more than 225 million worldwide across all domains, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), a provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world.
The brief also calls domain name hijacking a serious but manageable threat.
Growth rate of 2.7 percent
The increase of 5.9 million domain names equates to a growth rate of 2.7 percent over the third quarter of 2011, and marks the fourth straight quarter with greater than 2 percent growth. Registrations have grown by more than 20.4 million, or 10 percent, since the fourth quarter of 2010.
The .com and .net Top Level Domains (TLDs) experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter, reaching a combined total of 113.8 million names. This represents approximately a 2 percent increase in the base over the third quarter of 2011 and an 8 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010. New .com and .net registrations totaled 7.9 million during the quarter.
This is a 4 percent increase year-over-year in new registrations. The .com/.net renewal rate for the fourth quarter was 73.5 percent, up from 73.3 percent for the third quarter.
Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the quarter was 64 billion, with a peak of 117 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average increased 8 percent and the peak grew 51 percent.
Domain Name Hijacking – A Serious but Manageable Threat
The latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief focuses on “domain name hijacking,” in which perpetrators fraudulently transfer domain names by password theft or social engineering.
As defined by security experts, domain name hijacking occurs when an attacker falsifies the registration data for a domain name, transferring that name away from its rightful registrant and gaining full administrative and operational control over the domain.
The brief analyzes how attackers use a wide range of techniques to hijack domain names, from spyware and keystroke loggers to “social engineering,” in which scammers impersonate registrants, registrars, or other entities in the chain of trust in order to gain access to passwords and personal information.
Regardless of the technique used, the end-result for registrants is often severe. Once an attacker has full control of a domain name, they have free reign to use it for any number of nefarious purposes, from creating their own scam websites, to hosting illegal and dangerous content, to extorting the original owner.
While the danger of domain name hijacking is significant, it is a threat that can be significantly reduced with proper planning and mitigation techniques, such as:
- Researching a registrar’s security offerings — and taking advantage of the tools they offer — can go a long way toward mitigating risk of hijacking;
- Employing password best practices for domain name registrations;
- Determining if a registry is using two-factor authentication to protect registrants; and
- Utilizing services such as Verisign’s Registry Lock, which allows registrants to set the conditions under which their registration information can and cannot be changed.
Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2011 fourth quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at:http://www.verisigninc.com/DNIB.
Tags: domain name growth, domain name hijacking, top level domains, Verisign
Posted in Internet/New Media, Security, Studies, surveys, reports | 1 Comment »
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
 Availability of online e-commerce sites could be at risk — even for the largest e-tailers — due to Domain Name System (DNS) performance issues. Considering that the busy holiday shopping season is just around the corner, any unavailability during this critical time can be devastating for businesses, according to a new study commissioned by VeriSign, Inc.(NASDAQ: VRSN), a provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world.
The latest Verisign State of DNS Availability Report found that in the second quarter of 2011, even the top e-commerce sites suffered the kind of DNS failures that erode revenue and threaten customer loyalty. The report also spotlights the widespread need for solutions that ensure DNS availability — a crucial requirement for the reliable operation of websites, network services, and online communications.
Research Highlights:
Using proprietary technology, ThousandEyes, a company that provides application performance analytics, calculated the minimum, maximum, and average DNS availability of the Alexa 1,000 websites during the second quarter of 2011 to illustrate the state of global DNS availability.
The study found that minimum DNS availability averaged 95.05 percent for United States (U.S.) sites that host their own DNS, while U.S. sites using third-party managed DNS services averaged a minimum DNS availability of 97.35 percent.
This 2.3 percent difference in minimum availability equates to approximately 40 more minutes of downtime daily for sites with internally managed DNS.
Other key findings include:
1. U.S. websites with self-managed DNS experience almost 40 minutes more downtime daily, on average, than third-party managed sites.
2. Global minimum DNS availability averaged 95.30 percent for sites that host their own DNS, while sites using third-party managed DNS services averaged a minimum DNS availability rate of 97.14 percent.
3. Sites with internally managed DNS have a higher propensity to experience near to total outages, while sites with third-party DNS management did not experience total outages.
4. Businesses that rely on their online presence for critical operations, such as e-commerce, need to invest in secondary DNS management services — particularly if their primary DNS management strategy is internal — to act as a failsafe to serve traffic to their websites in the event that the primary DNS management tool becomes unavailable.
In addition to the DNS availability research, Verisign examined its own DDoS Protection Service customer data and found that e-commerce customers are facing longer than average Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The report notes that since Jan. 1, 2011, DDoS attacks mitigated by Verisign for its e-commerce customers lasted 40 percent longer than the DDoS attacks it mitigated for all other customer verticals combined.
“Maintaining a world-class DNS infrastructure is a complex undertaking that requires enormous scale and expertise,” said Ben Petro, senior vice president of Verisign’s Network Intelligence and Availability Group.
“As this latest research shows, self-managed DNS results in significantly lower availability that can cut into a company’s bottom line. With the host of other competitive issues facing retailers today, there’s no reason that website availability should be one of them when they can rely on Verisign’s suite of network intelligence and availability services to keep their sites up and running.”
Tags: domain name system performance issues, e-commerce, network downtime could affect holiday e-commerce, online holiday shopping 2011, Verisign
Posted in Internet/New Media, IT, Money | No Comments »
Friday, September 23rd, 2011
By Allan Maurer
 Ted McDonald - Web Analyst, Verisign One of the things Ted McDonald, Web Analyst for Verisign noticed at both his current and his last position, was the amount of junk traffic cluttering up reports with misinformation.
McDonald, who managed the web analytics program at Carfax before joining Verisign and managed web analytics at National Geograpic before that, will be discussing a few unusual tricks of the web analytics trade at the Digital East conference in Tysons Corner, VA, next Wednesday and Thursday (Sept. 28-29).
He is an expert at using Omniture products, like Discover and TestandTarget, and assessing the ROI of SEM and social media marketing efforts McDonald will be joined by dozens of experts, executives, and entrepreneurs in digital media, e-commerce, and the web world at the event.
Traffic that mucks up your data
One of the things he’ll discuss is how to detect that junk traffic and what to do about it.
At Verisign, he says, he has to deal with “A large number of people trying to hack us.” Seeing a lot of Eastern European traffic might be one clue that is happening, he notes.
Another problem he deals with is that of registrars hitting the site dozens of times a day. So to solve that and filter other traffic that isn’t relevant to the company’s consumer report, he looks at IP addresses and domain names.
He has triggers set up in the company’s web analytics program, Omniture, to alert him if a certain IP address is looking at the site’s Whois information a number of times a day and so on.
An allied problem to be on the watch for, says McDonald, is that for some reason, a number of site cruising bots – whatever they are – start visits on a site’s order confirmation page. That can seriously distort results if hits to the confirmation page are being used to count transactions. “It mucks up your data,” McDonald says.How
How many visits result in a transaction?
We asked if there are any metrics people should be looking at they might not be aware of. Mostly not, he says, but added, “There is one metric I like to look at that most analysts don’t: the impact of your pageviews on transactions. What you don’t know from a lot of standard reports – the top pages report, bounce rate, all of that – is of how many of the say 1,000 visits to a page resulted in a transaction five or six steps down?”
That is information that’s not readily apparent and “It’s something I look at that most folks don’t even know is an option,” he says.
McDonald says he’ll elaborate on these topics and others at the conference next week.
Tags: Carfax, counting web transactions, Digital East, Ted McDonald, Tysons Corner, VA, Verisign, web analytics, web filters
Posted in Events, Internet/New Media, Marketing, Potomac, Virginia, Washington, DC | 1 Comment »
Thursday, September 1st, 2011
More than five million domain names were added to the Internet in the second quarter of 2011, bringing the total number of registered domain names to more than 215 million worldwide across all domains, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief, published by VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world.
The increase of 5.2 million domain names marks a growth rate of 2.5 percent over the first quarter. Registrations have grown by more than 16.9 million, or 8.6 percent, since the second quarter of 2010.
The .com and .net Top Level Domains (TLDs) experienced aggregate growth, surpassing a combined total of 110 million names in the second quarter of 2011. This represents a 1.8 percent increase in the base over the first quarter of 2011 and an 8.3 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010. New.com and.net registrations totaled 8.1 million during the quarter. This reflects a 2.0 percent increase year over year in new registrations.
The top TLDs in terms of registrations remained largely unchanged between Q1 and Q2. The only change in the order was .cn (China) moving up one slot to become the world’s eighth largest TLD, and .eu (European Union) dropping one slot to become ninth largest. Taken together, country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) worldwide added a total of 2.9 million names in the second quarter.
Verisign’s average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during the quarter was 56 billion, with a peak of 68 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average declined 1 percent and the peak grew 1 percent.
Domain Brief Spotlights Small Businesses, New gTLDs
The latest issue of the Domain Name Industry Brief also focuses on some of the unique cybersecurity challenges facing small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), and some of the solutions that are available to those companies. In addition, it contains an update on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plan to introduce new generic TLDs (gTLDs).
The SMB section of the Domain Name Industry Brief focuses on how cybersecurity efforts in small and mid-sized businesses have failed to keep pace with rising threats against those very companies. As larger enterprises improve their defenses and make cybersecurity a larger priority, SMBs have become even more attractive to cyber-criminals looking for easy, and profitable, targets.
The brief outlines a combination of common sense security procedures and smart investments in security technology and services that can help SMBs protect themselves and their customers.
On the new gTLD front, the brief touches on ICANN’s decision to approve the creation of potentially hundreds of new gTLDs in the near future, and discusses what that means for potential applicants, brand owners, domain name registrants and ordinary Internet users worldwide.
Verisign publishes the Domain Name Industry Brief to provide Internet users throughout the world with significant statistical and analytical research and data on the domain name industry and the Internet as a whole. Copies of the 2011 second quarter Domain Name Industry Brief, as well as previous reports, can be obtained at: www.verisigninc.com/DNIB.
Tags: cybersecurity, Domain Name Industry Brief, gTLDs, Internet domain names, TLDs, Verisign
Posted in Internet/New Media, IT, Security, Studies, surveys, reports | No Comments »
Thursday, May 26th, 2011
 Motorolla's Xoom DULLES, VA – Four and a half million domain names were added to the Internet in the first three months of 2011, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief published by VeriSign, Inc. (NASDAQ: VRSN), the trusted provider of Internet infrastructure services for the networked world.
The first quarter of 2011 closed with a base of more than 209.8 million domain name registrations across all Top Level Domains (TLDs), or a 2.2 percent increase over the fourth quarter of 2010. Registrations grew by 15.3 million, or 7.9 percent year over year.
Verisign’s combined base of .com and .net domain names experienced aggregate growth in the first quarter of 2011, surpassing a total of 108 million names. New .com and .net registrations totaled 8.3 million during the first quarter. The total represents a 9.2 percent increase year over year in new registrations, and a 2.7 percent increase from the fourth quarter. The .com/.net renewal rate for the first quarter was 73.8 percent, up from 72.7 percent from the fourth quarter.
Tablet PC Market to Reach 100 Million Units by 2015
ROCKVILLE, MD – Worldwide Tablet PC market size in 2010 was nearly US$ 9 Billion and it is anticipated that Tablet PC unit sales will cross 100 Million Units by 2015. In 2010, US and Western Europe together holds 75% of Tablet PC unit sales share but they are gradually losing their share to China and Korea, according to Renub Research in a new report, “Worldwide Tablet PC Present and Future Market Scope (2010 – 2015) and its Impact on Various Sectors.”
Latin America Tablet PC unit sales and market size will keep on growing year on year but due to aggressive growth by China, its market share worldwide will decline year on year. India, Australia, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa and Middle East Tablet PC unit sales and market sizes will keep on increasing year on year (2010 to 2015).
The Tablet PC is expected to drive massive demand for digital content and services. Telecom service provider is likely to benefit most from it in the same way as they gained from smartphone boom. This is demonstrated by the fact that sales of the 3G iPad make up as much as 40% of total iPad sales. Internet traffic and location based services will increase tremendously thus creating a market for Internet service provider. This will further create a market for online paid content industry.
We’re still waiting for the tablet that will replace our netbook. Both the Xoom and the iPad weigh about 1.6 lb., almost exactly the same as the Acer netbook we’re using. The netbook does show signs of being under-powered (with only 1GB of RAM and running XP) and the Xoom we tested was certainly faster. We still prefer a regular (non-virtual) keyboard.
Kabam loads up with $85M for Facebook games
If we needed any more convincing that valuations and funding rounds in the California digital ecosystem are climbing into the stratosphere, here’s another:
Kabam, which offers games that appeal to the more serious electronic game fans on Facebook, has raised $85 million from investors including Google Ventures, Pinnacle Ventures. Performance Equity, SK Telecom Ventures, Canaan Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Intel Capital. This follows the firm’s $30 million raise a few months ago.
The company’s games include Glory of Rome, Dragons of Atlantis and Kingdoms of Camelot.
Dragons of Atlantis, which has about 4 million monthly active users, is its most popular.
We expect to see even more large rounds for West Coast digital media, gaming, and social media firms, but Southern Capitol Ventures David Jones warned at TechMedia’s recent Digital Summit in Atlanta that valuations on the East Coast – particularly in the Southeast – are not anywhere near what they are now on the West Coast.
Tags: Atlanta, Canaan Partners, David Jones, Digital Summit, Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Internet domain names, Kabam, market research, Pinnacle Ventures. Performance Equity, Redpoint Ventures, Renub Research, SK Telecom Ventures, Southern Capitol Ventures, tablet pc sales, Verisign
Posted in Internet/New Media | No Comments »
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