NEW YORK – VeriSign founder, Executive Chairman, President and CEO Jim Bidzos rings Tuesday the Nasdaq Opening Bell, to celebrate the company’s 20th anniversary of listing.
James Bidzos is another Greek-American who prospered in the technological revolution ear as Verisign Inc. provides domain name registry services and Internet security worldwide. Bidzos’ company offers a range of security services, including managed DNS, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) mitigation and cyber-threat reporting.
Mr. Bidzos has been included in The National Herald’s 2017 list of 50 Wealthiest Greek- Americans.
Bidzos served as its first CEO from 1995 to 2001. In 2010 the company’s authentication services were purchased by Symantec for $1.28 billion. Bidzos returned to the CEO job in 2011. The following year, he was named Fortune’s 2012 Businessperson of the year for reviving Verisign’s income, growth, and stock performance, which previously had flagged.
Born in Greece, Bidzos he came to the United States as a boy. His father worked as a barber, and his mother managed a restaurant. A former computer programmer, he is credited with foreseeing the need for online security in the early 1990s. Bidzos is an Internet and security industry pioneer, whose accomplishments include building RSA Security, an Internet identity and access management solution provider, into the early standard-bearer for authentication and encryption, and launching Verisign as a spin-off in 1995 to develop the digital certificate infrastructure for Internet commerce. Verisign operates infrastructure services that enable and protect billions of interactions every day across the world’s voice, video and data networks.