On October 19, the Cyberdom, a unique cybersec hub created to develop and support the Russian cybersecurity industry, hosted the award ceremony for the winners of the first “Heroes of the Runet” award. People, characters and phenomena that made up a picture of socially significant events in the Russian segment of the Internet in 202 3were named during the ceremony.
The organizer of the award was ROCIT, one of the oldest public organizations on the Runet, and the general partner was the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ.
Among the award winners are the creator of Telegram Pavel Durov, musician Rail Arslanov, pensioner from Shchelkovo Mikhail Makarov, members of the Tuvan group “Yat-kha” and many others. Also highlighted were the Looky social network, twin robots from the video game Atomic Heart, and the Internet meme “Self-confident Sharikov.”
“This award has an open ending, because every Internet user can name his own list of heroes and anti-heroes. I expect that next year, everyone will be able to add their assessment to the expertise of ROCIT members, the opinions of industry representatives and the readings of media meters on the basis of which the Runet heroes were identified,” Anton Gorelkin, the chairman of the ROCIT Board, first Deputy Head of the State Duma Committee on information policy, said.
The Russian neural networks “Shedevroom” (Yandex) and “GigaChat” (Sber) received a special prize from the Coordination Center.
“It is impossible not to note the contribution of Russian developers working on artificial intelligence products. It is obvious that we are on the threshold of a qualitatively new, evolutionary stage in the development of the Internet, when the consumption of information will take on completely different forms and formats,” said Andrey Vorobyev, director of the Coordination Center.
Also, as part of the “Heroes of Runet” award, the contribution of Russian cybersecurity specialists to maintaining the stability of the national digital infrastructure in the face of ongoing hacker attacks was noted. The figurine with the award logo was presented to Cyberdom CEO Sergei Kalmykov by Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation Alexander Shoitov.
