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.INFO was officially signed on September 1, 2010 and its Delegation Signer (DS) records were entered into the DNS Root by IANA on September 4th, allowing the .INFO zone to be validated using DNSSEC. The signing of the .INFO domain enhances global security for the seventh largest TLD in the world, home to more than 6.5 million registrations.

Afilias, a global provider of Internet infrastructure services, today announced that it has enabled Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) for the .INFO top-level domain (TLD). .INFO was officially signed on September 1, 2010 and its Delegation Signer (DS) records were entered into the DNS Root by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) on September 4th, allowing the .INFO zone to be validated using DNSSEC. The signing of the .INFO domain enhances global security for the seventh largest TLD in the world, home to more than 6.5 million registrations.

"The deployment of DNSSEC for .INFO continues Afilias' long-standing commitment to ensure security in the domain name system," said Ram Mohan, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Afilias. "Once fully deployed in .INFO, DNSSEC will provide a trusted foundation to authenticate DNS queries and responses and prevent DNS hijacking."

DNSSEC protects the DNS from cache poisoning exploits which can allow malicious entities to intercept an Internet users' request to access a website, and redirect or eavesdrop on the user without their knowledge, and with no ability to reassert control. DNSSEC introduces digital signatures to the DNS infrastructure and automatically ensures that users are not hijacked and taken to an unintended destination.

While Afilias completed the largest registry DNSSEC deployment on behalf of the Public Interest Registry when it enabled DNSSEC for .ORG in 2009-2010, the signing of the .INFO zone represents the first step in Afilias' recently announced "Project Safeguard" initiative, which will rollout DNSSEC across its registry and DNS platforms. Project Safeguard also includes an education and training program for Registrars to enable DNSSEC in their registration systems for website owners who intend to add DNSSEC signatures to their individual domains.

Now that the TLD is signed, Afilias will activate a "friends and family" period that will allow the public to gain experience with a select group of .INFO second level domain names that have also been signed. Shinkuro Inc. and Comcast have agreed to participate in this testing period. The list of "friends and family" domains includes: afilias.info, info.info, shinkuro.info, comcast.info, and 19 other domains from Comcast.

Later this year Afilias will be enabling DNSSEC for many of the other TLDs that it supports, in total adding DNSSEC for 13 more TLDs before the end of 2010. For more information on Comcast's participation, please see their DNSSEC Information Center.

About .INFO

.INFO was the first generic, unrestricted Top-Level Domain (TLD) to be launched since .com and is the most successful new TLD launched in over 25 years. Registrations in .INFO first became available in 2001. Since then, .INFO has grown to become the fourth largest generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) in the world with over 6 million domain names registered. .INFO Domains are currently available in ten Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) scripts. (Learn More)

Related topics: DNS, DNSSEC, Domain Names, Registry Services, Security, Top-Level Domains