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for actions had been submitted to the Kremlin through normal diplomatic channels.
The two presidents also discussed the war in Syria and US-Russia cooperation in that area, the Kremlin added.
Russian domestic cyber crime explodes
Russia has a large and growing problem with cybercrime that has been made worse in the last year by the coronacrisis, which has rapidly driven even more retail and banking online.
Russia’s e-commerce is booming and online business is growing five-times faster than the real economy. But criminal groups are flourishing in this environment. According to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin webcrimes were up by half in the first quarter of this year and by a third in the IT sector. Separately a report by the leading Russian online company Rambler found that two thirds of Russian internet users had experienced web fraud.
Ransomware attacks — in which hackers seize a company’s systems or data only to release it if a ransom is paid — have proliferated in the last year for the same reasons, but tend to be attacks on international companies, which attract less attention from the Russian authorities, are potentially more profitable and thanks to the lack of extradition treaties can be carried out with relative impunity.
In the US alone last year, ransomware struck more than a hundred federal, state and municipal agencies, upward of 500 hospitals and other health care centres, some 1,680 schools, colleges and universities and hundreds of businesses, according to t he cybersecurity firm Emsisoft, reports AP.
The White House has become alarmed by a series of high profile attacks recently coming out of Russia that includes attacks on US’s Colonial Pipeline, which was forced to close temporarily, JBS, the world’s largest meat processor, and Sweden’s Coop supermarket group that shut down 800 cash registers. The REvil hacking cartel demanded Coop pay a ransom of $70mn to have its system unblocked.
Russian bankers have also been calling on the state to crackdown on domestic cyber criminals after the losses due to fraud have spiralled upward from circa $1.5bn in 2019 to $6bn in 2020.
Russia leads by telephone fraud and the situation has all the signs of a national calamity, Sber (formerly known as Sberbank) Deputy Chairperson Stanislav Kuznetsov said last week.
“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, as cited by Prime.
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.
18 RUSSIA Country Report August 2021 www.intellinews.com