Fraudsters have moved from the Internet to social networks and messengers

The growth of phishing has slowed down in the Runet, and fraudsters have moved to social networks and messengers, experts told Izvestia.

The New Year in Runet started calmly enough, said Evgeny Pankov, head of projects of the Coordination Center for .RU/.RF domains. From January 1 to January 14, within the framework of the project "Domain Patrol" was recorded only 1.2 thousand appeals about the misuse of domains in the zones .RU and .RF, while for the same period in 2024 - 2.1 thousand.

Attackers have actually moved from the Russian segment of the Internet to social networks and messengers. Most often during the holidays, fraudsters used familiar schemes: voting to hack into Telegram accounts, selling fake tickets to Christmas trees and concerts, as well as fraud in the banking sector, he added.

The .RU and .RF domain zones in 2024 confirmed the status of a safe environment for users, Coordination Center Director Andrei Vorobyov told Izvestia. According to him, it was possible to reverse the trend of phishing growth in them, reducing the response time to threats by almost half.

Solar AURA service also notes a decrease in phishing activity in Russian domain zones. But it confirms that the activity of fraudsters remains high and the number of such sites continues to grow, just attackers choose other domain zones. So, according to the company, in 2024 in the leaders in the number of phishing sites was the zone .COM.

"More than half of phishing resources that experts identify and send for blocking, stop functioning within four hours, more than 95% - within a day. The minimum response time in 2024 was only four minutes," said Alexander Vurasko, development director of the Solae AURA, Solare Group's external digital threat monitoring center.

Today, technical defense tools make it possible to avoid most phishing attacks, but many Russians still do not have antivirus installed, especially on mobile devices, while it is a basic defense tool, said Duma deputy Anton Nemkin.

Read more in Izvestia's exclusive article:

Rushing to social networks: fraudsters have moved from the Internet to messengers