MOSCOW, February 2. /TASS/. The Russian Interior Ministry over the past 18 months has prevented $50-million damage from cyberattacks, the chief of the bureau of the Interior Ministry’s special technical operations, Aleksey Moshkov, said on Thursday.

"Over the past 18 months the Interior Ministry’s C (Cyber) department prevented more than 3 billion rubles ($50-million) from being stolen from Russian banks and also eliminated two crime rings that attacked credit and financial institutions," Moshkov said at the 19th national forum on international security Infoforum-2017.

He said Department C personnel had carried out vast work to detain all members of the exposed crime rings. Two criminal cases were opened.

Moshkov warned that the IT sphere promised lucrative gains for perpetrators and new crime groups might take the place of the just-eliminated ones.

To prevent further growth in the number of committed crimes it is essential to implement comprehensive measures based on the interaction of bodies of state power, society and business.

"Given the extremely high resourcefulness of cybercrime in the modern world, it is essential to focus efforts on the economic aspect to maximize the cyber criminals’ labor and financial costs and to force them into taking expensive and technically complicated measures to conceal their whereabouts and launder ill-gotten funds.

Earlier, speaking at a full-scale meeting of Infoforum 2017 the chairman of the State Duma’s committee on information policies Leonid Levin said that experts expected an upsurge in cyberattacks this year.

Foreign impact 

Some foreign countries are building up their possibilities to impact information infrastructure for political and economic goals, Deputy Head of the Information Security Center of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) Nikolai Murashov said on Thursday.

"The build-up by some foreign countries of their possibilities to impact information infrastructure for political and economic goals is one of the negative factors affecting information security," the FSB official said at the national information security forum Infoforum-2017.

Today information security "is characterized by the constant increase in its complexity and scope and the growth in coordinated computer attacks on critically important information infrastructure facilities," he said.

"At the same time, equally dangerous are computer attacks committed for criminal, terrorist and intelligence goals by some individuals, communities, foreign special services and organizations," he stressed.