On September 17, the 51st CENTR Administrative Workshop was held online. Taking part in it were 55 representatives of 27 domain registries that belong to CENTR, including experts of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
At the beginning of the workshop, Coordination Center Project Manager Svetlana Lobanova talked about the center’s latest events and new projects such as the TLDCON 2020 international conference held online on September 7-8, the Domain Patrol website, and work on implementing Universal Acceptance and monitoring coronavirus-related domains.
Head of Domain Patrol Olga Baskakova described how the center had come up with the idea to regularly monitor the .RU and .РФ ccTLD registers to identify domain names containing “сorona,” “covid,” “pandemia,” “ковид,” “пандемия” and other COVID-19-related words.
“It was difficult to choose key words for the monitoring. Of course, we had an initial list, but it grew larger at each stage. For example, in April when Moscow announced a strict lockdown, in May when payments for families with children began in Russia, and in August when Russia registered a coronavirus vaccine,” Olga Baskakova said.
The meeting participants were shown the results of monthly monitoring. March and April saw the highest number of coronavirus-related registrations, but in May the interest dropped. Over the eight months of monitoring (January-August 2020), .RU gained 4,171 coronavirus-related domains and .РФ added 858, for a total of 5,029 domains.
“It would be a mistake to consider all the domains with the key words malicious. For example, Russia’s well-known, official website on COVID-19 – стопкоронавирус.рф — contains two key words (corona and virus). So we also had to separate good and malicious websites,” Olga Baskakova said.
The speaker added that behavior models of Russian and European users were very similar and showed the level of coronavirus-related registrations in the Russian ccTLDs and the European Union’s domain zone, .EU. She also presented the results of research carried out by various organizations, including CENTR’s survey, which found that the pandemic had no large impact on registration systems. Olga noted that about 80 percent of European registries also monitored the registration of COVID-19-related domains.
Olga Baskakova described the measures Russia was taking to decrease cyber threats from such domains, using the example of cooperation between the Coordination Center, Kaspersky Lab and other competent organizations. The Domain Patrol website and a system for cooperation between official experts and registries with a total of 15,000 requests so far were established to inform internet users about the process and results of this cooperation.
