On February 14, as part of the Safe Runet Week, the ROCIT expert discussion “Open Dialogue on Safe Runet” took place at the TASS press center. Participants discussed the main cyber threats of the past year, additional measures to improve the security of Russian domain zones, the use of AI technologies and the main threats to the development of the Runet.
The discussion was attended by Deputy Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation Alexander Shoitov, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Policy, Information Technologies and Communications Anton Gorelkin, General Director of the Internet Development Institute Alexey Goreslavsky, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Andrey Vorobyev, project manager of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ Olga Baskakova, Director of the Edge Center Mikhail Shurygin and Director of Agenda Media Group Alexey Parfun.
The discussion was opened by Alexander Shoitov, who described the landscape of the main cyber threats based on the results of 2023, spoke about measures to prevent them, and also gave a forecast for 2024. Alexander Shoitov called cyber attacks one of the most important threats in the near future, and this threat can be counteracted primarily by building comprehensive information security systems.
Anton Gorelkin listed the main current threats and challenges facing the Russian segment of the Internet, and also announced relevant legislative initiatives, in particular, a bill banning the placement of advertising on the resources of persons recognized in Russia as foreign agents, which, according to the speaker, will be implemented in the near future will be submitted to the State Duma.
According to Andrey Vorobyev, despite the fact that the Internet addressing system seems to be a purely technical system, it is still both the object and the subject of offenses and attacks on the Internet, and sometimes even political games.
“The recent failure in the operation of DNSSEC showed the timeliness of the Law “On the Sovereign Internet” - thanks to it, the National Domain Name System, which during this “stress test” showed its performance, appeared in our country. Those operators who were connected to it restored their work in 20-25 minutes. However, not all connection methods turned out to be equally effective, and not all operators were connected - appropriate conclusions will be drawn, and “error correction” will be carried out in the process of updating encryption keys,” he said.
Center’s project manager Olga Baskakova spoke about industry self-regulation in the field of combating the DNS abuse in national zones .RU/. РФ using the example of the Domain Patrol project. She noted that this is an effective, but not always sufficient way to ensure the safety of users on the RuNet. Olga presented the practice of the Coordination Center on working with competent organizations and their interaction with accredited registrars.
According to project statistics, the number of requests related to offenses on the Internet is growing every year. Olga also noted that among the types of illegal activity, phishing leads by a wide margin, with the distribution of malware in second place and illegal content in third place. As a result of processing messages in 2023, the delegation of more than 54,000 domains, which is 98% of all requests, was stopped.
As a forecast for 2024, experts from the Coordination Center highlighted the increase in the number of incidents, and also noted the need for their investigations, improvement of the legislative framework and the introduction of unified identification and authentication in the domain name registration system.
Let us remind you that Safe Runet Week is an all-Russian federal event, within the framework of which government agencies and public organizations hold events on the topic of online safety.
