Page 115 - RusRPTAug21

9.1.7 TMT sector news
Russia leads by telephone fraud and the situation has all the signs of a national calamity, Sberbank Deputy Chairperson Stanislav Kuznetsov said on Wednesday. “According to our estimates, Russia leads by telephone fraud, by the crime called crime with the use of methods of social engineering,” Kuznetsov said at a news conference. Cybercriminals make about 100,000 calls a day, and every 10th call to any subscriber in Russia is a call by a perpetrator, and nine out of 10 owners of mobile phones have come across with phone fraud and got such calls, he said. “We see that phone fraud has almost doubled in a recent year and a half. We believe that the situation is so much difficult now that we think the situation has all the signs of a national calamity,” Kuznetsov said. Sberbank thinks about 150–170 criminal call centers now work against Russians, and each of them has 30 to 40 callers.
Most of Russian Internet users, or 69%, have experienced fraud on the Web, and a third, or 37%, have learnt about cybersecurity from online articles, according to a research conducted by media holding Rambler&Co. The study showed that 17% of the respondents have only read about Internet scams in the news reports, 11% have friends or acquaintances familiar with cyberthreats, and 3% think it happens only in films. Almost a third of the country’s Internet users, or 30%, try to keep their data safe by avoiding contacts with the people they do not know personally. The research was held among 400,000 users in early June on the Rambler portal.
The crimes committed on the Internet increased by 51.6% on the year in January–March, while the number of crimes in the IT sphere on the whole
115 RUSSIA Country Report August 2021 www.intellinews.com