On September 22-23, Sochi hosted the 14th Information and Communication Technology Regulation Forum (SPECTR 2025). As usual, this annual forum became a dialogue platform for leading experts representing government agencies, industrial public organizations, the telecommunications industry, and online businesses.
First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office Sergei Kiriyenko, Deputy Prime Minister and Government Chief of Staff Dmitry Grigorenko, Director of the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) Andrei Lipov and Minister of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media Maksut Shadayev sent greetings to forum participants.
Sergei Kiriyenko stressed that for many years, the forum has been the consolidating force for the state, the telecommunications industry and the IT community, focused on the consistent development of communications in Russia, higher security and quality of communications.
“High-quality and secure communication is the fundamental right of all people in Russia regardless of place of residence. Uninterrupted operation of the entire information infrastructure and its resilience against external impacts are of primary importance to us. These are the basic conditions for the country’s development and decent living standards,” his address states.
Dmitry Grigorenko noted that, to ensure public security in the new reality, the government is continuously improving legislation, implementing anti-scam services and other tools to protect users from hacking.
“Anti-fraud systems block more than 1.5 million scam calls daily. More than 53,000 malicious websites have been blocked this year,” he added.
“The essential aspect of digital sovereignty is the national digital ecosystem’s ability to continue effective operation even despite external attempts to cut us off the foreign segment of the internet or attempts to disrupt our domestic digital services. Digital sovereignty means ability to protect ourselves,” Andrei Lipov emphasized.
Deputy Director of Roskomnadzor Oleg Terlyakov noted that, with the rise of the Anti-Fraud system, scammers have to search for new ways to communicate with their potential victims – in particular, they are moving to foreign VoIP services.
“Scams involving Telegram and WhatsApp calls have multiplied since 2024. Restricting calls on these foreign messengers in 2025 has caused an immediate 40% drop in phone scams” the speaker said, stressing that today, it is important to prevent mass exploitation of the MAX messenger by scammers.
The Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ was the forum’s Golden Partner. The Coordination Center and the Russian Research Institute for the Development of Public Networks (RosNIIROS) presented their joint stand at the forum. Forum attendees learned about projects by Russian domain registries and participated in a quiz marking the 35th anniversary of .SU.
The Coordination Center held a session titled The Prospects of the Russian Domain. Director Andrey Vorobyev moderated the discussion among speakers, including Alexei Rogdev (Technical Center of Internet), Yevgeny Kuskevich (RosNIIROS), Yevgeny Morozov (MSK-IX), Andrei Kuzmichev (Ru-Center) and Olga Baskakova (Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ).
Andrey Vorobyev spoke about the importance of promoting multilingualism online and its significance for cultural and language diversity. He also spoke about expanding opportunities to register domains in minority languages in .РФ.
“Preserving and promoting online the languages of the many ethnicities of our multi-ethnic country is one of the priorities to anybody in charge of boosting and developing the internet. These efforts help increasingly more people access the internet in their mother tongues. Our project to implement the extended Cyrillic alphabet to the character set available for .РФ domain names is an important step towards developing digital sovereignty and maintaining Russia’s cultural and language legacy. This project is aimed at strengthening the status of the Russian language and other local languages in the global cyberspace,” Andrey Vorobyev stressed.
RosNIIROS Director for .SU Domain Yevgeny Kuskevich addressed multilingualism in the domain industry. He reported that on October 20, domain names in Simplified Chinese, Korean (Hangul), Thai and Hindi (Devanagari) became available in .SU. These additions expand the current scope of supported characters that so far included extended Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, as well as Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. Now, .SU covers all BRICS languages symbolizing the strengthening of cultural, technological and economic links in the Global South. Yevgeny Kuskevich emphasized that extending language support underscores the role of .SU as a space for intercultural dialogue, digital cooperation and international friendship, uniting users from different regions in a shared multilingual online space.
Coordination Center Project Director Olga Baskakova presented opportunities for the industry’s self-regulation to combat cyberthreats. One example she offered was the Domain Patrol project bringing together competent organizations and registrars. She noted that, after the explosive growth of phishing sites since 2022, there has been some progress:
“Now, we have reached a plateau in phishing site growth, mainly thanks to launching new channels to counter illegal activity and the government’s increased attention to this problem,” Olga said.
Domain Patrol statistics shows that until recently, the overwhelming majority of requests concerned phishing.
“We have achieved truly exemplary results: in 2024, domain delegation was withdrawn after reports to Domain Patrol in 98% cases. Furthermore, a share of websites either rectified their issues or were unblocked after eliminating grounds for blocking. This level of loyalty from our registrars has taken us substantial effort and more than ten years of work,” the speaker noted.
She finished her remarks by calling for improving the legislative framework and defining phishing in law while also implementing authorization using the Integrated Identification and Authentication System in Russian domain registration.
Runity CEO Andrei Kuzmichev shared results of domain security research. Director General of the Technical Center of Internet Alexei Rogdev spoke about the significance of Russian TLS certification market development for the Russian Internet. MSK-IX Director General Yevgeny Morozov spoke about localizing DNS traffic at Russian servers and its impact on Runet security, noting that with this strategy in place, 90% of Russian traffic stays in Russia.
