Despite the fact that the COVID-19 pandemic and the related measures to contain the coronavirus have become familiar to most Russians, cybercriminals have not stopped illegally using domain names that are closely related to the coronavirus pandemic. Therefore, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ continues to monitor such registrations in the Russian ccTLDs .RU and .РФ. The goal of the monitoring is to identify potentially dangerous domains and reduce the possible harm from them.
In April 2021, there was an increase in coronavirus-related domains compared to March. In March, 96 such names were registered, including 80 in .RU and 16 in .РФ, while in April their number almost doubled: in just a month, 168 domains related to COVID-19 were registered, of which 149 are in .RU and 19 are in .РФ. So far, this is the highest figure since the beginning of 2021.
Most of the April domains, as in March, contain the name of the virus, but their number has increased significantly: 127 in .RU and 15 in .РФ. Twenty-six domain names in .RU and five in .РФ are related to vaccination or include the names of vaccines in the Cyrillic or Latin alphabets. Another 16 domains (14 in .RU and two in .РФ) are associated with various COVID tests (for example, for the presence of the virus or, conversely, antibodies to it).
Over the entire observation period (from January 2020 to April 2021), the list of domain names containing the words "corona," "covid," "pandemia," "covid," "pandemic," "vaccine" and others gained 6,409 domains: 5,348 in .RU and 1,061 in .РФ.
If you faced negative consequences after visiting websites or reading emails that use phishing domain names, including those related to the coronavirus, then we kindly recommend you contact the hotline of one of the competent organizations engaged in internet security. Hotline numbers are available on the website of the Coordination Center’s other internet security project, Domain Patrol. It also publishes news from the information security industry, useful guides in case of encountering a cyber threat, and the rules of safe online behavior.
