Tyumen Region Deploys Preventive Cybersecurity System to Block Hackers
The SkyDNS cloud service blocks access to dangerous online resources before a connection can be established.
Russia’s information security market is gradually changing. The focus is shifting from responding to incidents after they occur to preventing them in the first place. This approach benefits not only businesses but also government agencies.
New Tool to Complement Existing Defenses
The Tyumen Region Center for Information Technology has deployed SkyDNS, a Russian cloud-based preventive cybersecurity service. It is designed to protect computers used by government agencies. The platform’s key feature is its ability to block requests to malicious resources while processing DNS queries, before a connection to those resources is established.
The new service is to complement the region’s existing cybersecurity tools. Since the beginning of the year, those tools have helped repel 14 million attacks targeting the regional government’s information systems. Attackers primarily look for ways in through email and applications that provide access to government services.
Addressing a Broad Range of Threats
SkyDNS blocks requests to domains associated with phishing, malware, botnets and hackers’ command-and-control infrastructure. The software also includes a feature that blocks requests to algorithmically generated domains. Malware uses these domains to locate command-and-control servers. In addition, the service detects signs of DNS tunneling, a technique for covertly transferring data through DNS queries.
“We use multiple layers of protection and try to block threats as early as possible. SkyDNS lets us do that when a user or system attempts to access a dangerous domain, before a connection is established. The service is integrated into our IT infrastructure and complements the security tools already in place. This helps keep government agencies’ systems running and ensures residents can access public services without disruption,” said Artur Usmanov, director of the Tyumen Region Center for Information Technology, a regional government institution.
The developers note that SkyDNS is listed in Russia’s Unified Register of Domestic Software. Its deployment supports the region’s drive to achieve technological independence in government IT infrastructure.
Rising Cybersecurity Requirements
The Tyumen Region has been developing its own cyberattack defense system for several years. In October 2026, the region won an award from the Business Information Security Association (BISA) in the “Leaders in Secure Digitalization” category. The deployment of preventive security tools such as SkyDNS is primarily a response to changes in regulatory policy. On March 1, 2026, Order No. 117 of Russia’s Federal Service for Technical and Export Control (FSTEC) took effect, establishing updated information security requirements for government information systems and other systems operated by government agencies and public institutions.
SkyDNS software has also been expanding its presence in the market for several years. As early as March 2022, the company’s technologies were in use at more than 300 internet service providers, 6,000 schools and libraries, and hundreds of commercial and government organizations. The company’s main areas of focus remain content filtering, access control and protection against network threats.
A Growing Range of Market Offerings
Other developers are also working to strengthen defenses against sophisticated threats. In 2024, for example, BI.ZONE released an update to its Secure DNS service, designed to provide more extensive analysis of DNS traffic. Its capabilities include improved detection of automatically generated domains.
In September 2025, the Solar Group of Companies announced the launch of Solar DNS Radar, a Russian product designed to identify dangerous domains and block connections to phishing resources and attackers’ command-and-control servers.
Cybersecurity experts expect similar solutions to become more widely adopted across the public sector in the coming years. This growth will be driven by stricter information system security requirements, the push for technological independence, increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks and the need to centrally manage security across large numbers of workstations.
