Stewardship is at the core of our mission and values. Just as we serve as stewards of the internet and our business – upon which billions of internet users depend – we are also committed to our people and to the communities where we live and work. We focus our activities and resources in ten key priority areas:

Oversight of Key Priority Areas

The Board of Directors maintains oversight of our key priority areas. Our Corporate Governance & Nominating Committee has general oversight, with certain specified priority areas overseen by other committees. For example, our Audit Committee oversees ethics and compliance and risk management, and our Compensation Committee oversees employee engagement and diversity, equity and inclusion and employee health and safety. Our Cybersecurity Committee oversees cybersecurity and privacy. The Company’s executive officers provide overall management through a cross-functional working group of senior employees.

Recent Highlights

We are proud of the achievements across our key priority areas. Select highlights of our recent activities in the priority areas include:

Community Engagement

Verisign Cares is our philanthropic and charitable program through which we seek to make a positive and lasting impact on the communities where we live and work. Our program’s 2023 activities included the following:

• Verisign made $1.15 million in direct charitable contributions to support organizations serving the needs of our communities, including food banks, workforce re-training organizations, veterans support organizations, and social justice organizations, among others.
• Through the Verisign Cares matching program our employees supported approximately 200 unique organizations, and Verisign matched these donations (up to $3,000 per employee).
• As part of a community service project, 150 Verisign employees volunteered to create 500 Hope Bags to donate to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). Hope Bags are given to children who are survivors of sex trafficking, sexual exploitation, and abduction, or who have run away from state or foster care, and the bags include basic items the children need in the first few hours and days after being rescued or recovered. NCMEC provides the Hope Bags to law enforcement and victim specialists who work with these children.

Environmental Stewardship

As an internet infrastructure provider, Verisign’s operations have a significantly smaller environmental impact than those of some businesses with greater focus on manufacturing and transportation, for example. Nevertheless, we recognize the importance of managing the impact we do have. For example, in our data centers, we seek to reduce expenditures and to lessen our environmental impact; some of our efforts have included implementing more energy efficient processes in our operations and seeking to obtain energy from renewable sources.

Ethics and Compliance

We maintain an ethics and compliance program which is managed by our Compliance Officer with Audit Committee oversight.

• Two key elements of our program are our Code of Conduct and our risk assessments, which help to establish priority resource, policy, training and other activities. We periodically update our Code of Conduct and our next periodic update is planned for 2024.
• We maintain an ethics helpline through which employees or others can seek guidance or raise a concern confidentially and anonymously if desired.

Privacy

Our privacy program is led by our Global Privacy Officer. The privacy program has established and maintains a “Privacy Center” on our website where our Privacy Statement and related privacy commitments are located. We most recently updated our Privacy Statement in 2023.

Most internet search queries to our DNS resolution system are from recursive servers (i.e., the servers of internet service providers) and not directly from individual internet users, which greatly minimizes the amount of information we receive from internet users, including potential personal information. While Verisign receives very little information of internet users as part of our DNS resolution operations, we protect any such data we collect and never sell or trade it. Our commitment to privacy is also exemplified in specific technology we use and develop to minimize the collection and use of personal information in the DNS resolution industry. Technology such as qname minimization allows resolution of DNS queries with only a limited portion of the query information, which greatly reduces the amount of information of internet users that DNS resolution providers like Verisign receive. Verisign granted a royalty-free license for the qname minimization technology and, as a result, a majority of all DNS queries now benefit from this privacy technology.

Responsible Sourcing

In 2024, we updated our Supplier Code of Conduct that requires our suppliers to comply with all laws, including anti-corruption laws, competition laws, and employment and labor laws (such as laws prohibiting discrimination, harassment, retaliation, forced labor, human trafficking, unlawful child labor, and other human rights abuses), and prohibits our suppliers from doing business with other parties that engage in human rights abuses.

For detailed information about the remaining priority areas, please consult the following referenced sections of our SEC filings and our website:

• Corporate Governance – see the “Voting Roadmap-Corporate Governance Highlights” section of our Proxy Statement
• Cybersecurity – see the Cybersecurity Disclosure in our Form 10-K
• Employee Engagement and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – see the Human Capital Management Disclosure in our Form 10-K and our EEO-1 Reports on our website
• Employee Health and Safety - see the Human Capital Management Disclosure in our Form 10-K
• Risk Management – see the “Board Responsibilities-Risk Oversight” section of our Proxy Statement
• DNS Abuse Mitigation – visit our website page Combating DNS Abuse