As the internet continues to grow, so does the criminal threat. In order to deal with this, VeriSign, who manage the .com and .net domains, plan to spend $100 million to improve security with what they have named Project Titan.

VeriSign said it escaped the recent attack on key Domain Name System (DNS) sites, but the domain manager expects both the size and scope of assaults to leap 50 percent per annum in the coming years.

As part of Project Titan, VeriSign plans to increase its current 20 gigabits per second (Gbps) capacity to more than 200Gbps, and the company will also expand the number of daily DNS queries it can process from 400 billion to 4 trillion, with VeriSign currently receiving 24 billion DNS queries each day. The DNS capacity is an important detail in Project Titan, in order to be secure in the event of a denial of service attack attempting to overwhelm the system by flooding it with queries.

By opening over 80 new Regional Internet Resolution sites VeriSign also wants to reduce Internet latency and increase redundancy. The new sites, situated in a variety of locations including India, Germany, Chile and South Africa, will join the current regional systems, including Korea, China, Brazil, Kenya and Egypt.

By 2010, there is expected to be 1.8 billion Internet users, with even more machine-to-machine growth, and within three years most of the world’s 2 billion cell phones will be Web-enabled, and tens of millions of households will have made the switch to Internet phone calling and television services, which is expected to result in a 20-fold increase in Internet usage from 2000.

To handle this upsurge, the domain firm plans to more than double the number of Domain Registration servers.

Stratton Sclavos VeriSign CEO and Chairman says the following on the matter "the Internet we know today is radically different than the one we knew just five years ago." Since 2000 a number of important sites including, social-networking behemoth MySpace, video-sharing site YouTube, and Internet phone company Vonage were founded. Search giant Google is under a decade old.

Speaking to internetnews.com IDC analyst Will Stofega states that the expansion is critical, saying that without it, "there’s a potential for greater disruption. We’ve come to rely on this thing," he said, in reference to the Internet.

It is expected that Sclavos will provide additional details of VeriSign’s expansion during his keynote at the upcoming RSA Conference.

VeriSign’s two root DNS servers — A and J — weren’t affected by the denial of service attacks targeting the 13 root domain name translation systems, but the assault "illustrates the need to protect the Internet’s infrastructure," a VeriSign spokesperson told internetnews.com.

VeriSign are saying the Internet must be fortified to confront the growing security threat, with security threats skyrocketing by 700 percent since 2000, according to Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Response Team and bandwidth requirements between 2000 and 2010 expected to jump by a factor of 10,000.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) extended VeriSign’s contract to manage the .com domain until 2012. Along with that win came news the company would restate $250 million in earnings between 2001 to 2005 and part of 2006 due to "incorrect measurement dates".