The 38th HostObzor Russian forum of hosting providers and domain registrars took place on March 29 at Moscow’s Kalibr technology park. With the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ acting as its traditional co-organizer, the forum focused on interactions between market actors and compliance with the so-called hosting providers’ law, i.e., Federal Law No. 149-FZ dated July 27, 2006, as updated on December 12, 2023, titled Information, Information Technology and Information Protection, and more precisely its Article 10.2-1.
Just as in previous years, the Coordination Center co-organized the forum and held the Domain Session.
During the first sitting, senior executives from ISPmanager, Fyodor Bogomolov and Maxim Darulis, presented what their company viewed as the most interesting and important events in 2023 and their plans for 2024. For them, launching a Cyrillic mailbox support was the highlight of 2023, while plans for this year focus on improving backup systems and expanding support to new operating systems. The company also focuses on promoting international partnerships.
The speakers also presented their new mascot Issi, and went on to talk about a partnership program, saying that ISPmanager partners in CIS countries increased their turnover by 21 percent year-on-year in January 2024.
The session continued with presentations by Inferit senior executives Dmitry Baranov and Yevgeny Zamry, who showed the MSVSphere operating system. Its developers believe that this operating system can offer an alternative to RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its derivatives such as CentOS, AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, OEL. Yevgeny Zamry talked at length about MSVSphere’s life cycle and the way it matches that of RHEL, and also covered integration efforts with ISPmanager.
Denis Lukash moderated an open debate on comprehensive security, during which participants discussed compliance with security requirements by hosting providers, as well as reporting incidents, efforts by hosting providers to offer and use information protection solutions, as well as fundamental matters dealing with working with security agencies within the SORM framework, working with the registry of addresses and numbers and the possible ways for using a single identification and authentication system for certain types of users.
Following the security session, Alexei Pronevsky, who heads the Cloud.ru situation room, shared his experience in setting up a reliability department based on a small IT monitoring unit, and talked about the way it operated and its performance.
During the session titled Living in a Registry, its participants discussed their expectations in terms of future regulations for their sector, and what IT companies using their own servers and holdings which do not have any external customers can do. The conversation also touched upon adding companies to the registry of hosting providers, working with suppliers and customers outside of Russia, as well as devising mechanisms to enable providers to engage directly with officials.
The 38th HostObzor Forum ended with the Domain Session. Organized by the Coordination Center, in started with the Chair of its Youth Council, Andrei Aleinikov, presenting the program for marking Runet’s anniversary in 2024. He invited the participants to take part in the 14th Russian Internet Governance Forum, to be held on April 9 and 10 in Moscow.
Georgy Georgiyevsky, who heads the Department of Registrar and User Relations at the Coordination Center, presented a new service. In fact, this was the first time this solution enabling government bodies to track domain name registrations in .RU and .РФ domains was presented to the public. “Rights of various entities are being violated at an increasing scale, and malicious activity and phishing are on the rise. Today, there is a need to regularly check the registered domain names against specific reference points. This why we designed a dedicated solution enabling government bodies and entities to check and track .RU and .РФ domain name registrations which fully or partially match symbols and their combinations as defined in advance. By analyzing this data, government bodies can independently identify domain names violating their rights or which could be involved in phishing attacks or other infringements, as well as act to eliminate these violations,” the speaker pointed out.
The Domain Session ended with a presentation by Kaspersky Lab’s Senior Expert, Sergei Golovanov, who offered an overview of information security incidents in 2023-2024, saying that compared to 2022, the year 2023 saw a surge in the number of Kaspersky Lab security solutions users who encountered malicious activity detected. Russia was in the red zone in 2023 with an incidence rate ranging between 62 and 73 percent in 2023, up from the yellow zone and a rate of 45-55 percent in 2022.
He went on to share last year’s statistics and emphasized that the number of blocked phishing links in Russia increased by a factor of five. Sergei explained where the attacks were coming from, how long they lasted and what Kaspersky Lab was doing to combat cybercrime.
The 38th HostObzor Russia forum of hosting providers and domain registrars wrapped up on that note. Registration for the next forum, scheduled to take place in St. Petersburg on May 30 – June 1, is already open.
