VeriSign has acknowledged that they have been “repeatedly” by hacked by people that stole undisclosed information. The unconfirmed breaches happened in 2010. VeriSign believed that the hackers breached the servers responsible for supporting the company’s DNS network.

Symantec Corporation (NASDAQ:SYMC) is close finalizing a bid for Verisign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN)? for $1.3 billion according to The Wall Street Journal. VeriSign certifies websites that are legitimate so that consumers can feel safe when making purchases through e-commerce. Symantec is based in Mountain View, California. [WSJ]

Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) chief technology officer Ari Balogh is leaving the company for “personal reasons.” Yahoo! said that Balogh’s replacement will be coming in the next few weeks. Yahoo! is considering Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) online ad exec Blake Irving. Balogh joined Yahoo! a couple years ago from VeriSign. [paidContent]

Bit.ly is the biggest URL shortening service thanks to the popularity of Twitter.  Given that websites and files are masked by Bit.ly, spammers and virus artists are taking advantage of the situation.  A normal message may be followed by a Bit.ly URL that links to a malicious website.  In a blog post from earlier today, Bit.ly announced that they are partnering with VeriSign, Websense, and Sophos to scan through links and identify which of them are spam are viruses.  Bit.ly has about $2 million in funding and became the Twitter default URL shortening service in May 2009.  Bit.ly is based in New York City.

According to Verisign, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRSN), about 24 million domain names were registered in 2008.  At the end of 2008, a total of 177 million domain name registrations across all top level domain names.

This is 16% growth over previous years.  In the fourth quarter of 2008, about 10.1 million new domain names were registered.   The top 5 most registered domain name suffixes are .com, .cn, .de, .net, and .org.

[via BizJournals]