IB Reforms

2022: Rostec brings cybersecurity into a separate company. An adviser to its head was the former deputy head of the FSB IB block

As TAdviser found out in February 2022, Rostec will concentrate the state corporation's competence in the field of information security in a separate company - IB Reform JSC. Until now, the functions of the Rostec competence center in this area have been concentrated in RT-Inform, IT-daughter of the state corporation.

According to the Kontur.Focus legal entity database, Reform IB JSC was formed on the basis of Reform IB LLC, in which RT-Inform received a stake of 50.01%. The second co-owner is Computing Solutions JSC, which is a co-founder of Computing Solutions LLC. The site of the latter says that it is a Russian company developing high-tech hardware, software and software solutions since 2014, has a staff of highly qualified specialists with extensive experience in the field of IT and IB. Among the company's products is VR Protect antivirus. In 2020, the average number of employees of Computing Solutions LLC was 114 people, and revenue was 1.5 billion rubles.

The "Reform IBs" will concentrate Rostec's competencies in the field of IBs "(photo - Viktor Molodtsov, Rostec)"

IB Reform LLC as a legal entity has existed since 2019. Its description on one of the recruiting sites stated that it provides services for the design and implementation of computing complexes, network infrastructure, engineering systems, the implementation and maintenance of software solutions, the provision of IP, technical support and IT outsourcing at facilities and enterprises of industry. The company did not receive significant revenue in the first two years. So, according to Kontur.Focus, in the year of foundation its turnover amounted to about 1.45 million rubles, and in 2020 there was no revenue at all. For the last reporting period, financial indicators have not yet been published.

Computing Solutions LLC received a 25% stake in Reform IB LLC in 2020, and in April 2021 became its 100% co-owner, later transferring a little more than half of the authorized capital to RT-Inform.

The IB Reform website on the Internet is presented under the RT Information Security (RT IB) brand with the Rostec logo. It formulated the main mission of the company: a systemic solution to the tasks in the field of IB - a transition from formal fulfillment of the requirements to a real effective integrated approach to protect critical information infrastructure (CII) objects, as well as any information systems of Rostec enterprises and in the country as a whole. As of the beginning of the year, Rostec includes about 1.2 thousand enterprises.

In connection with the increasing level of threats to the information security of critical information infrastructure at the facilities of enterprises of the military-industrial complex, as well as the need to consolidate the relevant competencies within the state corporation Rostec, its management in 2021 decided to determine the Reform IS as a single Center for Competence and Procurement Activities in Information Security, the company's website says.

The presented list of the company's services as of the beginning of February 2022 includes 16 areas, including monitoring and response to computer incidents (the SOUNDcenter), audit and consulting in the field of information and communications technology, protection of CII, personal data, state IT systems, personnel selection and advanced training of Rostec employees for information and communications technology.

After its entry into the state corporation, Timur Serdyuk became the general director of IS Reform. He is a member of the board of directors of RT-Project Technologies, a company within Rostec that specializes in the implementation of promising projects in the field of IT.

Rostec chose not to comment on TAdviser's creation of an IB competence center on the basis of a separate company and its development plans. Since the accession of IB Reforms, the state corporation has not feared it.

However, briefly about the "IB Reforms" at an industry conference on IB in February 2021, Nikolai Andrianov, director of special assignments of Rostec, and Dmitry Pravikov, presented as an adviser to the general director of IB Reforms, told. Andrianov, in particular, spoke about the goals, tasks set for the new organization, the directions of its activities. Among the goals, Andrianov led to an increase in the level of actual security of enterprises of the state corporation, optimization of costs for providing IS, unification of approaches to implementing the requirements of the regulatory framework and increased control of measures to provide IS.

The company builds its work within the framework of the service model and in close cooperation with the security units of enterprises, the representative of Rostec noted.

The latter was emphasized by Dmitry Pravikov: he noted that the IB competence center cannot live separately without internal information security units, they are needed to investigate internal attacks. Moreover, some of the attacks, such as phishing, are better visible from the point of view of the internal IB unit.

If we talk about the Rostec state corporation, most likely, we will go towards a distributed center, where some of the functions of the monitoring center will be performed by internal information security units, "Pravikov shared with the participants in the event.

According to TAdviser, this speaker is the same Dmitry Pravikov, the former deputy head of the Center for Information Security (CIB), FSB about which in 2017 the media wrote in connection with the criminal case. Then journalists, citing a representative of the Moscow District Military Court, reported that he was given three years probation in the case of abuse of office^[1]

At the time of the report on the establishment of a criminal case in 2017, a source of the Kommersant newspaper on the IT market noted that Dmitry Pravikov was "a legend in the field of information security," and that "he wrote articles and books on which many studied"^[2].

On the website of the Russian State University of Oil and Gas named after I.M. Gubkin Dmitry Pravikov is indicated by the head of the Scientific and Educational Center for New Information and Analytical Technologies (NOC NIAT). And at an industry conference in February, he also introduced himself as the head of the department of integrated security of critical facilities of the same educational institution. He also said that he acted as head of the IS department of one of the enterprises included in the Rostec circuit.

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