According to the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, which continues to monitor the registration of .RU and .РФ domain names that are linked to COVID-19, or related to measures to contain the pandemic, 97 such names were registered in February: 84 corona-domains in TLD .RU, and 13 in .РФ.
Most of these domain names contain the name of the virus – 47 in .RU and 9 in .РФ. Another 38 new registrations in .RU and 6 in .РФ are associated with vaccinations or include the name of the Russian vaccine, Sputnik V, in Cyrillic or Latin script. Eight domains (six in .RU and two in .РФ) contain the word test, which may be associated with testing for the virus or for antibodies.
Compared to January 2021, the pace of registrations of coronavirus-related domains has decreased. In January, 157 corona-domains were registered in Russian domain zones, 128 in .RU and 29 in .RF.
Over the entire period of observation (from January 2020), users registered 6,145 domains containing the words corona, covid, pandemic, pandemia, vaccine and others, including 5,119 in .RU and 1,026 in .РФ.
As a reminder, the purpose of monitoring .RU and .РФ domain registrations is to identify suspicious registrations in .RU and .РФ and to reduce potential harm from them. The results of the February survey of Russian domain zones were typically sent to Kaspersky Lab, which is competent in detecting violations on the internet.
Kaspersky Lab has flagged 1,908 coronavirus domains, 1,607 in .RU and 301 in .РФ with “data loss threat” in its products (five more after the latest check) – about 31 percent of the total number of coronavirus domain names.
If you encounter any negative consequences after visiting such web resources or downloading emails using similar domain names, we advise you to contact the telephone hotline of one of the competent organizations in the field of internet security. Hotline numbers can be found on the website of the Coordination Center’s Domain Patrol project, as well as news from the information security industry, more instructions on dealing with potential cyber threats and rules of safe behavior online.
