VeriSign warns DoS attack could bring down the net

Ken Silva, VeriSign's chief security officer, said: "There are attacks attempting to shut down our servers. This would effectively shut down the internet."

Silva said that although DoS attacks are difficult to trace, there are "a couple of well-known groups in Russia, China and Romania" that may be acting with their government's knowledge. "It would be hard to imagine groups who have this much activity going unnoticed by their governments," he said.

He said VeriSign "hoped to get smarter" in blocking malicious traffic: "We can continue to add bandwidth but ultimately, 20 years down the road, this can't continue as a foot race. The internet as a whole has to get smarter in denying DoS attacks."

VeriSign is currently upgrading its infrastructure in a scheme called Project Titan. This has included adding bandwidth but it is also monitoring its systems more closely.

Silva said: "Our monitoring systems now resemble those for the space shuttle. We monitor the capability of our CPUs and memory allocation on all of our servers. We're predicting what problems will occur rather than waiting for them to occur."