If the rise of phishing has taught us anything, it's that on the Internet, if a digital asset has value, there's somebody out there who wants to steal it. Whether it's a bank account password, a credit card number, a PayPal login, or even a magic sword in an online game, there's a fraudster somewhere trying to misappropriate it for his or her own nefarious purposes.

Domain names have always been a target for such criminals. Companies and individuals doing business online have few assets more valuable than their domain name. It may cost $10 or less to register one, but the domain name is the glue that connects a company to its customers; revenue and brand equity depend upon its security.

July 15, 2010 (yesterday) marked the end of the beginning for DNSSEC , as the DNS root was cryptographically signed. For nearly two decades, security researchers, academics and Internet leaders have worked to develop and deploy Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). DNSSEC was developed to improve the overall security of the DNS, a need which was dramatized by the discovery of the Kaminsky bug a few years ago.

What were you doing this week back in 1985? Answer: Probably watching the debut of Back to the Future, a early Steven Spielberg movie which incorporated novel uses of technology to travel in time. During that same time in 1985, however, another innovative use of technology was also making its debut—one with much greater implications for improving our lives on a global scale.

Attendees at the public ICANN meeting in Brussels today heard from over two dozen companies that have implemented or are planning to support DNSSEC, the next-generation standard protocol for secured domain names. It is clearer than ever before that DNSSEC is becoming a reality.

The deployment of Domain Security Extensions (DNSSEC) has crossed another milestone this month with the publication of DURZ (deliberately unvalidatable root zone) in all DNS root servers on 5 May 2010.

While this change was virtually invisible to most Internet users, this event and the remaining testing that will occur over these next two months will dictate the ultimate success of DNSSEC deployment across the Internet.

Over the last three years, the Anti-Phishing Working Group’s semiannual Global Phishing Survey has become a widely cited source of information about the state of phishing and its place in the Internet landscape. Afilias’ Director of Domain Security, Greg Aaron, has been co-authoring these reports with Rod Rasmussen of Internet Identity, with the goal to show the community what phishers are doing and how anti-abuse measures are effective.

You may have seen media reports a few weeks ago describing how servers behind the so-called Great Firewall of China were found delivering incorrect DNS information to users in the rest of the world, thereby redirecting users to edited Web pages. Reports indicate that this apparently occurred due to a caching error by a single Internet Service Provider. While the problem was fairly limited in scope, it could have entirely been prevented in a world where DNSSEC was fully deployed.