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Corona-domain registrations drop by one third in May

The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ continues to monitor the pace of .RU and .РФ domain name registrations that include words semantically linked to the coronavirus pandemic and publishes its monitoring data on a monthly basis. The purpose of the monitoring is to identify potentially dangerous domains and reduce any possible harm from them.

In May 2021, fewer corona-related domains were registered compared to April. The reason for this, most likely, was the long weekend in May – cybercriminals are people and they like a vacation as much as anyone. In April, 168 such registrations were made, 149 in .RU and 19 in .РФ; in May, the numbers were smaller, especially in .РФ – a total of 118 including 112 in .RU and six in .РФ. It was also the lowest total ever for .РФ.

Most of the May registrations, as in April, contain the name of the virus, but the number dropped significantly: 80 in.RU and two in .РФ. As many as 33 new domain names in .RU and three in .РФ have to do with vaccinations or include the names of COVID-19 vaccines in Cyrillic or Latin. Another three domains (two in .RU and one in .РФ) are associated with COVID-19 tests (for the virus or for antibodies).

Over the entire observation period (from January 2020 to May 2021), users registered 6,527 domains containing the words сorona, covid, pandemia, ковид, пандемия, вакцина and others, including 5,460 in .RU and 1,067 in .RF.

If you encounter any negative consequences after visiting such web resources or downloading emails that use phishing domain names, we advise you to contact the telephone hotline at one of the organizations in 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 for safe activity online.

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