VK Sells 100% of RuStore to CEO Dmitry Pankrushev, Transferring Full Control to Management Team
VK has agreed to sell 100% of the RuStore app store to the management of the company that develops and operates it. The buyer will be RuStore General Director Dmitry Pankrushev, meaning the Russian application marketplace is moving out from under the direct oversight of VK and into the hands of its own operational team.
The financial terms of the transaction, including the sale price and any other conditions, have not been made public. In statements released by VK, RuStore is positioned as the single unified gateway to essential Android services inside Russia and as an important distribution channel for domestic application developers.
Following completion of the deal, the RuStore team has pledged to maintain its existing development roadmap. This includes continuing to issue regular updates, expanding the store's functionality, and ensuring uninterrupted operation for both users and developers.
From the perspective of ordinary users, the change in ownership is not expected to produce any sudden differences: the store will remain accessible, installed applications will continue to function, and the service's overall direction is set to stay the same. Nevertheless, the move marks a notable corporate rearrangement.
One of Russia's leading alternative app stores will now develop independently of VK and under the full authority of its own management. The transaction effectively implements a "take it and run it yourselves" model, giving the RuStore team complete control over the product's future strategy and operations.
The key question now is whether this separation will accelerate the store's growth and feature development or whether it will amount to little more than a formal change of ownership on paper.
Related articles
Home Lab Guide: Deploying Active Directory, Windows 7 Client and ELK Stack for Security Logging
A detailed tutorial walks readers through building an isolated VirtualBox lab featuring a Windows Server 2019 domain controller with DNS and DHCP, a Windows 7 client joined to the domain, and an ELK stack running Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana 9.4.2. The guide covers creation of organizational units, Group Policy Objects for advanced auditing, and configuration of Winlogbeat 7.17 to forward Security, System and Application logs to Logstash. Special attention is given to common pitfalls such as missing GPO extension attributes that prevent audit policies from applying and memory constraints when running the full ELK stack on limited RAM. The author emphasizes that Windows 7 is unsupported and should only be used in isolated lab networks. All steps are provided with exact PowerShell commands, netplan configurations, and Logstash pipeline examples suitable for a 192.168.100.0/24 NAT network.
Building Your First Home Network Lab: Essential Tools and Experiments to Understand Corporate Networks
A cybersecurity professional without network knowledge resembles a guard without a building blueprint, spotting alarms but unable to trace the intruder. Setting up a personal lab on a standard computer bridges this gap through virtualization and hands-on practice with protocols and attacks. The guide recommends GNS3 for topology emulation, VirtualBox or VMware for running Windows and Linux workstations, Cisco Packet Tracer for quick simulations, Wireshark for traffic analysis, and draw.io for diagramming. Key experiments include configuring Cisco IOS routers with IP addressing, testing default gateways, observing ARP requests and replies, triggering broadcast storms via switch loops, and enabling STP to prevent loops. The lab demonstrates how legacy protocols like ARP expose networks to spoofing and why segmentation with VLANs and firewalls matters. Resources from CyberED provide demo access to courses on SOC analysis, penetration testing, and AI applications in security to extend learning.
PSLC and Agent-Ops: From Product Support to Infrastructure Transformation
Sergey Zhitinsky, founder of Git in Sky, attended the OPS Talk by Sber meetup on October 19 and discussed the PSLC methodology with architect Alexander Shapovalov. PSLC, or Product Service Lifecycle, outlines two loops for restoring services immediately and improving reliability to prevent recurrence through teams, knowledge, and platform support. Agent-Ops focuses on eight detailed steps for individual infrastructure tasks: intention, evidence collection, diagnostics, planning, approval, controlled change, verification, and lessons learned. The article illustrates their complementary use in a scenario where post-release log growth fills a database disk, requiring both service restoration and root-cause fixes. Both approaches emphasize knowledge retention, action control, and human accountability, though Agent-Ops v0.5.1 mandates explicit human approval and separate execution for production changes. PSLC suits larger organizations with shared platforms, while Agent-Ops targets smaller teams handling infrastructure operations with AI agents.
Russian Organizations Allocate 4.5 Trillion Rubles to Innovation Spending in 2025
Large and medium-sized Russian organizations directed a total of 4.5 trillion rubles toward innovation activities during 2025. Nearly half of the expenditure originated from the services sector, while information technology and telecommunications accounted for 860.9 billion rubles. The Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge at HSE University published the figures based on Rosstat data, showing an innovation intensity rate of 2.7 percent. Services companies alone contributed approximately 2.3 trillion rubles, including 882.7 billion rubles for research and development. Astra Group IR Director Vladislav Anshakov outlined major spending areas such as product development, cloud and AI hardware, and acquisitions of technologies and teams. The group expanded its portfolio with the Perseus DBMS and a 26 percent stake in AI developer AIB. More than one-third of organizations cited high costs and insufficient internal funds as key barriers to further innovation.