On May 5, the world's top domain authorities (led by ICANN, the US Government and Verisign) will complete the first phase of the roll-out of DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) across the 13 root servers that direct user requests to the relevant websites on the internet.

The DNSSEC upgrade adds a digital signature to the response from every DNS (Domain Name Server) request to give an internet user an extra level of assurance that the domain name is translated to the correct Internet location (such as a website, or email destination).

DNSSEC was developed in an attempt to thwart 'man in the middle' attacks, in which hackers intercept a request and respond with a message that fools the user system into going to a false location.