Verisign

Verisign Inc. is an American company based in Reston, Virginia, United States, that operates a diverse array of network infrastructure, including two of the Internet's thirteen root nameservers, the authoritative registry for the , , and generic top-level domains and the country-code top-level domains, and the back-end systems for the and sponsored top-level domains. In 2010, Verisign sold its authentication business unit – which included Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, public key infrastructure (PKI), Verisign Trust Seal, and Verisign Identity Protection (VIP) services – to Symantec for $1.28 billion. The deal capped a multi-year effort by Verisign to narrow its focus to its core infrastructure and security business units. Symantec later sold this unit to DigiCert in 2017. On October 25, 2018, NeuStar, Inc. acquired VeriSign’s Security Service Customer Contracts. The acquisition effectively transferred Verisign Inc.’s Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection, Managed DNS, DNS Firewall and fee-based Recursive DNS services customer contracts. Verisign's former chief financial officer (CFO) Brian Robins announced in August 2010 that the company would move from its original location of Mountain View, California, to Dulles in Northern Virginia by 2011 due to 95% of the company's business being on the East Coast. The company is incorporated in Delaware. Verisign was founded in 1995 as a spin-off of the RSA Security certification services business. The new company received licenses to key cryptographic patents held by RSA (set to expire in 2000) and a time-limited non-compete agreement. The new company served as a certificate authority (CA) and its initial mission was "providing trust for the Internet and Electronic Commerce through our Digital Authentication services and products". Prior to selling its certificate business to Symantec in 2010, Verisign had more than 3 million certificates in operation for everything from military to financial services and retail applications, making it the largest CA in the world.