Here's where the reality meter goes into overdrive. VeriSign is also the company that sells about half of the net's SSL certificates for "secure ecommerce [4]." These SSL certificates are what presumptively protect connections between consumers and merchants. It is claimed that a certificate that is signed by a certificate authority (CA) can protect against the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack and also domain name spoofing.
A further irony is that VeriSign also runs the domain name system for the .com and the .net domains. So, indeed, they do have a hand in the business of domain name spoofing;
The point here is that, on the one hand, VeriSign is offering protection from snooping, and on the other hand, is offering to facilitate the process of snooping.
