Q&A: Security needs to be proactive, says VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos

Computerworld - This week was a busy one for Verisign Inc., as it launched new services designed to grow its security portfolio well beyond its core authentication technologies. The company delivered the first of a series of quarterly reports on the state of global Internet security. It sold its Network Solutions business, which provides Internet domain name registrations, to Pivotal Private Equity for approximately $100 million (see story). And VeriSign was busy fending off continued criticism of its recent Site Finder service. Here's what VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos had to say about this week's developments:

What prompted your decision to sell Network Solutions? We believe we can be the best in the world at delivering critical network services for voice and data. Network Solutions, as it exists today, is more focused on Web presence services for consumers and small business. It is not a critical-infrastructure service. The transaction allows VeriSign to pursue its core mission while giving Network Solutions the flexibility to determine its own destiny.
Why should your customers care about the Security Intelligence and Control Services offering that VeriSign announced this week? We are trying to take the idea of security and turn it from a defensive posture into an offensive posture. [We are about] creating an early warning system and tools that our customers can use to ... do things before they are attacked rather than after they are attacked.
How will you do that? With VeriSign's unique infrastructure for handling many of the critical services for the Internet -- the .com and the .net, DNS [Domain Name System], transaction processing for 25% of North American e-commerce -- we have a very large amount of data that can be analyzed. We can use that intelligence to understand what attacks are occurring, where they are coming from and what their most likely targets are. We are going to use that intelligence to not only provide network security services but also a combination of application services and commerce services.
But others have been delivering similar services for some time. What's VeriSign's value-add? On the DNS system, we see 10 billion interactions a day. Our nearest competitor would claim to have 10,000 or 20,000 probes out at their customer sites that they are watching to get this intelligence. So the amount of information that we have to do this is far beyond what [others have].
What is the status of your Atlas project to redesign the DNS? I'm glad you asked. We started out in the summer of 2000, as we had