“This expansion provides redundancy and reliability, and specifically deals with the increasing attacks we have out there,” Aristotle Balogh, VeriSign vice president of operations and infrastructure, said.
A study by Zone-H, a network of volunteers who track hacker activity, showed that server attacks rose by more than a third last year.
DNS servers are the backbone of the Internet, translating text-based domain names into numeric IP addresses and routing traffic around the world. Because they are critical components of Internet infrastructure, attacks can result in widespread outages.
In 2002, hackers bombarded several root servers with a flood of data designed to overwhelm them and shut them down, an attack that raised the worries of an all-out Internet collapse.
VeriSign operates several of the Internet’s root servers under a federal contract with the U.S. Commerce Department.
Under the plan, VeriSign, which previously had a policy of operating only a few servers in about 18 key hub areas, will now place replicas of its root servers in up to 100 data around the globe, according to Balogh.
The theory behind the move is that, should an attack take place, traffic can simply be routed through another server.
The added servers also would speed up web browsing since servers will be physically closer to name servers, networks and end users.
“We will be closer to the user and the network, so it won’t take as long to get a response,” Balogh said. “I want to be less than 50 milliseconds away from 90 percent of the world’s online users.”
VeriSign has been under heavy fire from site owners who complain that the company exerts too much influence over the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization responsible for root server system management functions, and for questionable practices such as redirecting traffic to its pay-per-click web directory.