Internet infrastructure company VeriSign last week released the first of its VeriSign Internet Security Intelligence Briefing papers.

The first paper - available at the web address below - covers the operation of Domain Name System (DNS) technology, digital certificates, and other managed security services.

VeriSign said that it had seen the number of DNS queries grow to 10 billion a day, three times the number in 2000. Consumer spending online has also grown rapidly. VeriSign said transactions per online seller grew by 17 percent between the second quarter of 2002 and the second quarter of 2003.

It added that most of these transactions were protected with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.

But it is not all good news for online companies. The report warns that, "the growth in internet usage has been outpaced by increased security and fraud threats", and it offers the Sobig virus as a recent example.

During the peak of Sobig, VeriSign reported a 25 percent growth in DNS traffic on its root servers.

VeriSign's fraud prevention systems found that up to 6.2 percent of e-commerce transactions in the US were potential fraud attempts. However, it also found that over 52 percent of all fraud attempts originated from outside of the US.

Interestingly, VeriSign found that attackers who gain control of internet host machines often use them both for attacks and fraudulent e-commerce transactions.

VeriSign said its briefing papers would be issued quarterly to provide IT managers and the internet community with, "a deeper understanding of internet usage, security, and fraud".