resources simply trying to respond to a larger number of (possibly bogus) DNSSEC requests. Some protocol extensions, such as TCP Cookie Transactions, have been developed to reduce this loading. To address these challenges, significant effort is ongoing to deploy DNSSEC, because the Internet is so vital to so many organizations. Early deployments Early adopters include Brazil (.br), Bulgaria (.bg), Czech Republic (.cz), Namibia (.na) Puerto Rico (.pr) and Sweden (.se), who use DNSSEC for their country code top-level domains; RIPE NCC, who have signed all the reverse lookup records (in-addr.arpa) that are delegated to it from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). ARIN is also signing their reverse zones. In February 2007, TDC became the first Swedish ISP to start offering this feature to its customers. IANA publicly tested a sample signed root since June 2007. During this period prior to the production signing of the root, there were also several alternative trust anchors. The IKS Jena introduced one on January 19, 2006, the Internet Systems Consortium introduced another on March 27 of the same year, while ICANN themselves announced a third on February 17, 2009. On June 2, 2009, Afilias, the registry service provider for Public Interest Registry's .org zone signed the .org TLD. Afilias and PIR also detailed on September 26, 2008, that the first phase, involving large registrars it has a strong working relationship with ("friends and family") would be the first to be able to sign their domains, beginning "early 2009". On June 23, 2010, 13 registrars were listed as offering DNSSEC records for .ORG domains. VeriSign ran a pilot project to allow .com and .net domains to register themselves for the purpose of NSEC3 experimentation. On February 24, 2009, they announced that they would deploy DNSSEC across all their top-level domains (.com, .net, etc.) within 24 months, and on November 16 of the same year, they said the .com and .net domains would be signed by the first quarter of 2011, after delays caused by technical aspects of the implementation. This goal was achieved on-schedule and Verisign's DNSSEC VP, Matt Larson, won InfoWorld's Technology Leadership Award for 2011 for his role in advancing DNSSEC. Deployment at the DNS root DNSSEC was first deployed at the root level on July 15, 2010. This is expected to greatly simplify the deployment of DNSSEC resolvers, since the root trust anchor can be used to validate any DNSSEC zone