The number of registered Internet domain names in the world grew by three million in the second quarter of 2010, breaching the 196 million mark this year, according to the latest Domain Name Industry Brief by Internet infrastructure provider VeriSign.

The Domain Name Industry ended the second quarter of 2010 with a base of more than 196.3 million domain name registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names (TLDs). The second quarter total represents an increase of 2 percent over the first quarter of 2010. Compared to the second quarter of 2009, registrations grew by 12.3 million, or 7 percent, across the industry.

The combined base of .com and .net domain names surpassed 100 million, finishing the quarter with an adjusted zone size of 101.5 million. New .com and .net registrations totaled 7.9 million during the second quarter, an increase of 13 percent from a year ago. The .com/.net renewal rate for the second quarter was 73.2 percent, up from 72.1 percent for the first quarter.

VeriSign's average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load during second quarter 2010 was 62.5 billion per day, with a peak of 83.6 billion. Compared to first quarter 2010, the daily query average increased 16 percent and the peak grew by 32 percent. Taken annually, the daily average increased 28 percent and the peak daily queries grew 43 percent.

Forrester Study: DNS Security Extensions Ready for Prime Time
The latest Domain Name Industry Brief also spotlights the industry's progress in implementing DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), which is designed to protect users against "DNS cache poisoning" and "man-in-the-middle" attacks by cryptographically signing DNS data. In July, VeriSign joined with U.S. Department of Commerce and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to deploy DNSSEC at the root of the DNS.

A new Forrester Research study conducted on behalf of VeriSign shows how timely the implementation of DNSSEC is. For the study, titled DNSSEC Ready for Prime Time, Forrester polled 297 IT decision-makers. The survey revealed that DNS attacks are commonplace, and this has made DNS security a top-line concern for companies and organizations. Forrester found 51 percent of respondents reported experiencing DNS-related attacks, 38 percent of whom said they had experienced man-in-the-middle attacks, which DNSSEC is specifically intended to prevent.