[ISN] Verisign Plans for Security Alert System

From: InfoSec News (isn@private)
Date: Thu Nov 06 2003 - 22:55:15 PST

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    http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1374754,00.asp
    
    By Caron Carlson 
    November 5, 2003   
    
    WASHINGTON - In a project dubbed Electra, Verisign Inc. plans to
    expand its proprietary DNS server platform—called Atlas—into a
    grid-like infrastructure to support more-sophisticated traffic
    analysis and pattern recognition. Electra, which will be unveiled next
    year, will help support an early warning system for Internet attacks.
    
    The Mountain View, Calif., company will combine data streams obtained 
    through its online payment service and its naming and directory 
    services to identify threat correlations, according to company 
    chairman and CEO Stratton Sclavos. The online payment system processes 
    96 million transactions a day, detecting commercial fraud such as 
    identity theft; and the directory services manage 10 billion 
    connections a day. 
    
    Put together, the systems can provide the basis for an offense 
    strategy for battling viruses, worms and other Internet attacks, said 
    Sclavos, who was in Washington Wednesday promoting the company. With 
    more sophisticated data analysis, Verisign will be able to offer 
    enterprises earlier warnings about attacks and a prioritized list of 
    remedial steps, he said. 
    
    Verisign has spent $100 million over the past three years upgrading 
    its infrastructure, according to Sclavos, who said the company is 
    committed to further research and development. 
    
    "We're going to spend the money regardless of whether we get paid for 
    it," he said. 
    
    Early analysis of data from the online payment and directory services 
    suggests that commercial fraud and distributed attacks generally 
    originate from the same IP addresses, according to Sclavos. Regions 
    such as Eastern Europe and Africa appear to be a common source of both 
    credit card rings and DDOS attacks, he said. 
    
    "It is clearly coming from the same regions," he said. "The newest set 
    of threats seems to be much more organized, much more massive." 
    
    As for Verisign's controversial Web site redirect service, SiteFinder, 
    which it was forced to shut down last month following worldwide 
    complaints, Sclavos expects to re-launch it next year. In the 
    meantime, he said, modifications will be made to the service, 
    including added language support and an improved method of handling 
    mail traffic. 
    
    
    
    
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