The Cyrillic domain .РФ is becoming popular among cybercriminals.

Security experts from Doctor Web report an increase in fraud related to the use of Cyrillic domains in the Russian .РФ zone. The experts attribute this to a decrease in the number of available domains in the .RU, .COM, .NET, and .ORG domain zones.

There are currently approximately 940,000 domain names registered in the .РФ domain, but it has a large number of available domains, especially compared to other, older domains. The study's authors also note that it is much easier to find available domain names here.

This reason is attractive to cybercriminals, who create fake pages in the Cyrillic .РФ domain that mimic the design of well-known websites.

Experts have already identified fake websites in the .РФ domain for the social networks VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, the Otvety@Mail.Ru service, and a number of file-sharing networks.

In 2012, according to experts from Doctor Web, this trend will grow.