Domain names are used to locate an organization on the Internet. Each domain name maps to a specific IP address.

So, for example, in the URL www.kaspersky.com, the ‘com’ part of the domain name is the top-level and indicates the general purpose of the organization, in this case ‘commercial’ (others include ‘org’, ‘net’, or geographic domains like ‘co.uk’).

The ‘kaspersky’ part of the domain name is the second-level and is a descriptor for the organization itself: this can be thought of as a human readable version of the IP address. Second-level domain names must be unique (and are registered through ICANN [Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers]).

The ‘www’ part of the domain name indicates the server (in this case, web server) that handles Internet request.

The translation of domain names into IP addresses is carried out by DNS servers located throughout the Internet. When a user types in a URL, a nearby DNS server will map the domain to an IP address or pass it to another DNS server. There is also a sort of ‘mini DNS server’ stored within Microsoft® Windows® operating systems, called the hosts file.