[ICANN]<http://www.icann.org/> News Alert https://www.icann.org/resources/press-material/release-2-2015-10-07-en ________________________________ Vocus Communications Contributes to Responsive and Resilient Internet with L-Root Instance in Australia Establishment of instance in Australia helps further decentralise the top level of the DNS, mitigate certain network outages, and reduce DNS-related delays 7 October 2015 Sydney, Australia - The L-Root instance in Australia has been successfully installed in Sydney, increasing the Domain Name System's (DNS) overall fault tolerance and its resilience against certain types of cyber threats, such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The launch of the L-Root server node is a joint operation between ICANN and Vocus Communications which supplied the equipment necessary for the installation of the new L-Root node. Vocus also provided the colocation in their datacenter and the bandwidth needed for the node's operation. "We are delighted to support the installation of the L-root server, boosting stability and security in the network. Last year saw a massive 121 per cent increase in infrastructure based DDoS attacks, which means security is more important than ever. Creating greater redundancy in the DNS is great news for Australian businesses which increasingly require the reliability of a fast and secure network," said Vocus Chief Technology Officer, Luke Mackinnon. "I am very pleased with our partnership with Vocus. We have a very close working relationship with Australia's multi-stakeholder Internet Governance community and I am happy to facilitate the deployment of another root server instance into Australia," said Savé Vocea, ICANN's Global Stakeholder Engagement Vice President for Pacific Islands. This cooperation signifies an effort between ICANN and Vocus to enhance the security, stability and resiliency of the DNS for Australian Internet users and reduce the response time experienced when making some DNS queries. "ICANN is pleased to augment the number of L-Root instances in Australia. We appreciate the tremendous effort from Vocus in hosting the L-Root. Their work speaks volumes to their commitment to both the Domain Name System and the stability and resiliency of the global Internet," said Terry Manderson, Director of DNS Engineering at ICANN. There are 13 "root" DNS servers, identified by the letters A through M - the "L" root server operated by ICANN being one. Computers typically communicate with each other using numeric addresses, while humans find it easier to use and remember names (for instance, users typically remember the domain name "ICANN.ORG" more easily than the Internet Protocol address, 2620:0:2d0:200::7). The DNS translates domain names into addresses and the root servers provide the pointers to the servers for top-level domains (the last part of domain names, for example, "ORG" in "ICANN.ORG"). Spreading the service that provides these pointers out geographically by duplicating the root servers leads to a more resilient, dispersed system that reduces the risk of users being taken offline by a problem or attack and reduces the time it takes to look up names on the Internet. The Vocus hosted L-Root instance is the sixth root server instance in Australia. For more information about L-root, please visit www.dns.icann.org/<http://www.dns.icann.org/>. # # # Media Contacts ICANN Liana Teo Head of Communications, Asia Pacific Singapore Tel: +65 6816 1259 Email: liana.teo@icann.org<mailto:liana.teo@icann.org> VOCUS Megan Sam, N2N Communications Tel: 02 9213 2300 Email: msam@n2n.com.au<mailto:msam@n2n.com.au> ________________________________ About ICANN ICANN's mission is to coordinate and ensure a stable, secure and unified global Internet identifier system. To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an identifier into your computer - a name or a number. That identifier has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation that supports and coordinates participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. ICANN promotes competition and develops policy on some of the Internet's unique identifiers. ICANN doesn't control content on the Internet. It cannot stop spam and it doesn't deal with access to the Internet. But through its coordination role of the top level of the Internet's identifier systems, it does have an important impact on the expansion and evolution of the Internet. For more information please visit: www.icann.org<https://www.icann.org/>. About VOCUS (ASX:VOC): Vocus Communications is an ASX listed leading telecommunications provider of Data Centre, Dark Fibre and International Internet connectivity across Australia, NZ, Singapore and the US. The company provides high performance, high availability, and highly scalable communications solutions, which allow service providers to quickly and easily deploy new services for their own customer base.