Russia Introduces Stricter Rules to Set Domain Names

In an attempt to bring down inappropriate content and Internet fraud, the firm accountable for administering .ru top-level domains in Russia is tightening up its procedures.

April 1, 2010 onwards, to register a .ru domain, it will be mandatory to submit a copy of passport, or legal registration papers for businesses. Presently, no such verification is required to set up domains; resultantly, scammers promptly establish .ru domains using fake names.

Notably, from past few months, Russia is confronting continued cyber attacks. As per the estimates of the top ten spammers, seven are Russians. In 2009, these top Russian spammers earned $ 127 Million (3.74 Billion Rubles). Besides, of all Russian Internet ads, one-fifth is spam.

In Russia, anti-spam legislation is almost fictional, and hence unsurprisingly, most of the people are functioning openly, without any sense of prosecution.

As a result of ambiguities in the system of setting domain names in Russia, porn sites operators, scammers and spammers get a nice opportunity to avoid being detected on the Internet, as they conceal their identities. As soon as their identities are unearthed, cyber felons appear on different domains, playing hide and seek with security experts and law enforcement.

Experts said that Chinese also introduced similar restrictions in the beginning of the year 2010, and Russians are simply following. It was observed in January this year that 15-20% of all the URLs in spam e-mails were .cn, and just 1-2% were Russian. However, it was recently observed that things went other way round as 30-40% of the URLs are Russian while merely are .cn, said Candid Wueest, Security Analyst at Symantec, according to the news published by PCPro on March 22,2010.

Remarking about this new move taken by Russia, informational projects manager, Olga Ermakova, with the Coordination Center for the .ru top-level domain, stated that due to these changes, Russia will be able to adjust its rules with international best practices, according to the news published by PC ADVISOR on March 22, 2010.

However, the manager worries that like China, the regulations set by Russia will just push the issue some where else. He added it will just shift to some other country; may be Vietnam or any other nation which is unregulated is next in the line.

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» SPAMfighter News - 4/1/2010