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VeriSign, Inc. is leading provider of digital trust services that enable everyone, everywhere to engage in commerce and communications with confidence. Digital trust services create a trusted environment through four core offerings—Web presence services, security services, payment services, and telecommunications services—powered by a global infrastructure that manages more than 6.5 billion communications and transactions a day.

VeriSign's registrar serves as the gateway for establishing an online identity and Web presence, with more than 12 million active domain names in .com, .net, .org, .tv, .cc, and .ws.

As the leader in the Web site security market, VeriSign has an installed base of 385,000 Web site certificates.

VeriSign's Payment Services business includes 70,000 active online merchants.

Through VeriSign® Global Registry Services, VeriSign maintains the definitive directory of over 27.3 million Web addresses and is responsible for the infrastructure that propagates this information throughout the Internet. VeriSign Global Registry Services responds to over five billion DNS lookups daily.

SSL - Short for Secure Sockets Layer, a protocol developed by Netscape for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL works by using a public key to encrypt data that's transferred over the SSL connection. Both Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer support SSL, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information, such as credit card numbers. By convention, URLs that require an SSL connection start with https: instead of http:.