PRESS: Russian cbank to block malicious Web sites within day

MOSCOW, Jan 10 (PRIME) -- The Russian central bank has obtained a status of a competent organization to reveal Web sites with illegal content and malware and block them within a day, the Izvestia daily reported Tuesday.

The regulator blocked some 1,500 malicious Web sites in 2016, and with the new powers it could significantly improve the situation in the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, known as the Runet.

The central bank will provide data on virtual thieves to the coordination center of the national domain to block suspicious sites as soon as possible. A spokesperson for the regulator said the central bank can close dubious resources almost independently, and the procedure will take just a day. The corresponding agreement for three years was signed at the end of 2016.

The regulator’s FinCERT, a center of monitoring and response to computer attacks in the financial sector, helped in 2016 to block 1,588 phishing Web sites, which threatened financial and information security of citizens and the national payment system, the spokesperson for the central bank said. The bulk of site closures fell on October–December 2016.

According to the coordination center, Russia has over 6.4 million registered resources with domain names of .ru and .рф. A spokesperson for Yandex.Browser said 370,000 of them convey threats, and their volume is growing.

“Every month we reveal 3,000–4,000 new phishing pages on average, and their list is being added several times per day. Although, even over an hour of their life, one malicious page can harm users,” the spokesperson said.

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