MSK-IX / News / Pavel Khramtsov: Netoscope highly useful for entire Internet industry

October 21, 2015

Pavel Khramtsov: Netoscope highly useful for entire Internet industry

Companies involved in the Netoscope Internet services monitoring project met on the sidelines of Russian Interactive Week (RIW) 2015 on October 21 to mark three years since the project got off the ground. Pavel Khramtsov, who is also in charge of the DNS MSK-IX projects, leads the project.

Mr Khramtsov, who was the moderator at the conference, commented on how Netoscope has enhanced Russian Internet security and also urged companies' representatives to discuss what else they could do to counter cyber threats. Those present at the conference said that Netoscope processed an increasing amount of information and that many companies were showing interest in cooperating with Netoscope.

All speakers at the meeting said ads and promotional applications were one of the main sources of malware along with unsanctioned data encoding when people are made to pay for decoding.

Technical aspects of data security were also highlighted at the conference. Dmitry Belyavsky from Technical Center of Internet (TCI) presented the results of a study of TLS use in Russian domains. He said the Russian use was up to international recommendations. Dmitry Chistov of the Russian search engine Sputnik elaborated on the practical use of data received from Netoscope and their influence on Internet content filters providing Internet safety for children.

Alexander Kalinin from Group-IB said the .РФ domains remained virtually clean, and there had only been a few malware incidents in new Russian domains since his company got involved. Group-IB specializes in preventing cybercrimes on the Russian Internet. In the first eight months of this year alone, the company detected over 700 potentially dangerous domains and had 604 of them closed.

Andrei Yarnykh from Kaspersky Lab said that sadly a large part of Netoscope's data remained unused. He added that if project partners and all interested companies and organizations made use of the data in full, it would considerably improve online data security.

"We can see tangible results of our companies' partnership. We have accumulated vast expertise in the practical use of the project's aggregated data in the fight against cyber threats," Mr Khramtsov said in conclusion. "All this makes our users' life more comfortable and secure, and the companies and the entire industry can feel the difference that our project makes." Alexander Ilyin, technical director of МSK-IX, also took part in the conference.

Netoscope is a data and analysis tool that contains the latest data on Internet cyber threats and efforts to block dangerous websites and programs. The tool gets information from the project's database provided by companies involved that exchange data on malware. Companies working on the project today include Group-IB, Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, Kaspersky Lab, Mail.ru, Sputnik (Rostelecom), RU-CERT, TCI, and Yandex.