VeriSign Expands in Five U.S. Markets

VeriSign, Inc. (VRSN) said it has deployed new infrastructure facilities in Miami, New York City, Chicago, Palo Alto and Washington, DC to upgrade its domain registry operations and DNS resolution sites. The company has also expanded its Regional Internet Resolution Sites (RIRS) in Argentina, Bulgaria, Lithuania and South Africa, and is and is negotiating with India, Germany and Chile to deploy infrastructure in those countries.

The upgrades are part of VeriSign's Project Titan, a program to invest $100 million in expanding VeriSign's ability to manage the domain name infrastructure for the .com and .net top-level domains. These systems currently get 30 billion DNS queries per day, up from 24 billion at the start of 2007. The initial phase of its Internet infrastructure upgrade has increased its capacity to 2 trillion Domain Name System (DNS) queries a day. Project Titan's long-term goal is to expand VeriSign's capacity to handle more than 4 trillion DNS requests per day by 2010.

The upgrades are needed to protect the DNS system against cyber attacks that are growing in both scale and sophistication, according to VeriSign. "If the Internet infrastructure is not continually fortified and strengthened, then we run the risk that it will be unable to support the growing and dynamic needs of users, businesses and governments that rely on that infrastructure every day for commerce, communications and operations," said Ken Silva, chief security officer at VeriSign. "For the Internet to remain a trusted platform, there must be complete confidence that it can scale to meet the demands and protect itself against attacks by those who want to disrupt it."

VeriSign manages the infrastructure that handles registration and resolution traffic for the .com and .net systems, and also operates the A and J root servers, which serve as the central directory to route Internet traffic to other top level domains.