Banks and fuel and energy companies were offered to prohibit interaction by e-mail with foreign IP addresses

The Federal Service for Technical Export Control (FSTEC) has invited critical Russian companies to improve the security of their corporate email systems. To do this, operators, banks and fuel and energy companies are invited, among other things, to prohibit interaction with foreign IP addresses when using corporate mail, writes “Kommersant”.

In its February presentation, FSTEC paid special attention to the security of mail systems of significant companies, the newspaper notes. In addition to the ban on interaction with foreign IP addresses, it is proposed to disable remote access to critical nodes and networks, as well as to prohibit open relay (servers that allow mail to pass through them uncontrollably).

In addition, the FSTEC proposes to strengthen protection against “internal violators”. To do this, according to the department, it is necessary to prevent the intersection of the rights of the administrator and employees, as well as record the actions of privileged users.

As the newspaper notes, this approach of the FSTEC cannot be called new for the public sector. So, since January of this year, state institutions are required to use e-mail addresses using domain names and network addresses located in the Russian national zone.

According to experts from Informzaschita, banning open relay and disabling direct remote access to control interfaces is a good practice, but limiting interaction with foreign IP addresses can lead to negative consequences, since companies can interact with counterparties using such addresses. The head of the Information and Analytical Service of the OD “Information for All” Yevgeny Altovsky also drew attention to the fact that the ownership of foreign IP addresses changes regularly. This means that companies will have to constantly check who owns the IP address of the mail server, and there may not be ready-made solutions to automate this process.

How wrote Earlier, Vedomosti, the number of cyber attacks on the public sector in Russia in 2022 increased by 2-3 times compared to 2021. The main vectors were DDoS and web attacks on public resources of government agencies.