VeriSign Announces Major Initiative to Strengthen
and Diversify its Global Internet Infrastructure by 2010
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
Mountain View, CA – 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 utilize
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 specialized 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. For more information visit, www.verisign.com/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 http://www.verisign.com.
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: Rufus Manning, rmanning@verisign.com,
703.948.4126
VeriSign Investor Relations: Ken Bond, kbond@verisign.com,
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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