On May 18, the Coordination Center for .RU/.РФ domains held a domain section that has already become traditional for the RIF. This time, the main topics for discussion were regulatory and sanctions impact, countering the domains abuse, and the development of IDN.
Representatives of competent organizations and accredited registrars, experts of the Coordination Center have addressed the section. The section was moderated by Andrey Vorobyev, director of the Coordination Center. He spoke about the sanctions pressure that is currently being put on the Russian domain industry by some representatives of government agencies of individual countries, and also about the reaction to this pressure from international structures responsible for the stable operation of the Internet. “Most international organizations refused to apply any discriminatory measures against Russian TLDs or Russian companies and organizations that provide their work, emphasizing in their official statements that the Internet is a united environment for all countries. However, a number of registrars and registries faced sanctions from Western financial institutions. In the field of experience exchange and joint projects, we can note a “turn to the East” - we began to pay more attention to cooperation with our Asian colleagues and partners. The Coordination Center has been a member of the Asia Pacific Top Level Domain Association (APTLD) for many years, but it is in recent times that we have become more actively involved in the activities of this organization. The next APTLD meeting will take place in October in Oman, and we are planning a number of our performances there,” Andrey Vorobyev said.
Georgy Georgievsky, Head of the Department for Work with Registrars and Users of the Coordination Center, spoke about how accredited registrars have restructured their work in connection with the sanctions. He gave many examples of prompt solutions to the most unexpected problems of domain administrators - from transferring domain names from foreign to Russian registrars to "rescuing" the sites of Russian users who used the services of foreign hosts. Georgy also spoke about the work that the Coordination Center does to support registrars: “We have strengthened the marketing component to support and promote the .RU and .РФ domains, conduct trainings for registrar employees, invite well-known business trainers to conduct classes - one such training is going to be held on 19 May on the RIF. Georgy Georgievsky cited impressive growth in the number of registrars - since 2020 their number has increased by 73 companies, and now Russian domain name administrators are served by 120 registrars.
Irina Danelia, Deputy Director of the Coordination Center, spoke about the implementation of domain name registration using the Unified Identification and Authentication System (ESIA). Today, the ESIA contains more than 94 million verified identification records, most Russian citizens have mastered this tool, so the planned introduction of domain name registration through the ESIA should not cause problems for users. 2 accredited registrars are now connecting to the ESIA in a test mode, in addition, the issue of how to identify administrators of existing domain names through the ESIA is being worked out. This approach will eventually improve the quality of the .RU and .РФ domain zones and make the Russian domain space more safe.
Aleksey Rogdev, General Director of the Technical Center Internet, continued the topic of identifying Russian domain administrators and said that the TCI is currently working on updating the registration system, and ESIA will be one of the identifiers in the new system. He also presented the work being done by the TCI to ensure the stability of the Runet. “DDoS attacks have become familiar today - we are no longer afraid,” said Alexei Rogdev.
The topic of domain space security was continued by representatives of competent organizations. Sergey Golovanov (Kaspersky Lab) spoke about the main trends in this area. “The main trend is that the number of incidents is growing, but at the same time the number of illegal resources is falling, and this trend is typical not only for Russia, but for the whole world,” Sergey Golovanov noted. Over the past 15 years, the likelihood of an Internet user encountering a malicious program has significantly decreased: from 75% in 2010-2015 to 10-15% today. Yaroslav Kargalev (Group IB) noted that scams and phishing are the key security trends today, while the entry threshold for fraudsters is decreasing and the number of victims of targeted fraud is growing.
According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the number of cybercrimes in 2021 amounted to 500,000. On average, 77 illegal resources are blocked per day, and most of them are phishing. Interestingly, the response to a request for a phishing resource in Russia is on average 22 hours, while in the world this figure is 24 hours. Over the past year, the number of phishing resources in the Russian .RU and .РФ domains has decreased by 1%, while in other national domains there is an increase in registrations of such domains.
The domain section was completed by Vadim Mikhailov, technical consultant of the Поддерживаю.РФ project, who presented the history of the internationalization of the Internet and the current development of IDN domains in Russia and the world. He recalled that a week ago the Russian national Cyrillic domain .РФ celebrated its 12th anniversary, and in this regard, he spoke about the existing technical solutions for supporting Cyrillic domain names and email addresses, as well as about what work is being done within the framework of the Поддерживаю.РФ project for further development of the Cyrillic domain
