On November 16 at the Bonch-Bruevich Saint Petersburg State University of Telecommunications held open lectures by experts from the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ as part of a series of events on the topic of user information security.
SPbSUT Vice-Rector for Project Activities Evgeniy Milaev delivered a welcoming speech. He noted the value of events in the field of cyber hygiene and the role of the university in promoting the safe use of the network and technologies, and also thanked the experts of the Coordination Center for supporting the SPbSUT initiative.
“SPbSUT is a center for the development and support of advanced information and communication technologies in the region. The university aims to develop students’ sustainable skills not only in technical, but also in user information security. It is important for us to interact with the Coordination Center on this topic, we hope to continue cooperation in the future,” he added.
The event was opened by Maria Kolesnikova, Chief Analyst and “Поддерживаю.РФ” Project Manager of the Coordination Center. Maria spoke about the main activities of the Coordination Center, the development of the Russian national domain zone, as well as the organization’s current projects, in particular, the “Поддерживаю.РФ” project, aimed at expanding support for Cyrillic Internet identifiers in software, and the “Domain Patrol” project, where network users can report cases of misuse of domain names they discover to the hotlines of competent organizations.
The first lecture by Andrey Yarnykh, an information security expert and member of the Coordination Center commission on controversial issues related to accreditation, was devoted to modern threats on the Internet, including those related to the use of smart home technology. The expert cited statistical data regarding attacks and the speed of work of modern attackers to crack passwords, and focused the attention of listeners on the importance of using complex passwords, and also spoke about the main signs of fraudulent resources.
The event was continued by Vadim Mikhailov, consultant for Infrastructure of the Coordination Center, technical expert of the “Поддерживаю.РФ” project. He spoke about the trend towards internationalization of Internet addressing, about IDN domains and email addresses with national alphabet characters (EAI), revealed the concepts of homoglyphs, ligatures and homographs, and also talked about how fraudsters use similar characters to create phishing resources and compromise corporate email (BEC), and what mechanisms exist to counter such attack schemes.
After the lecture, students took part in the project’s quiz “Study the Internet & Govern It!”, aimed at testing and consolidating the acquired knowledge in a playful way. Evgeniy Pankov, an information security specialist and project manager of the Coordination Center, conducted a quiz for students. Teams of SPbSUT students demonstrated their knowledge and competed for valuable prizes from the Coordination Center.
