Ukrainian drones struck data centers belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex over the past week. Following the strikes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that there was a sudden drop in Russian bot activity and political disinformation campaigns on platforms like X. Social media users took the story — Ukraine had taken out a massive Russian bot operation — and ran with it.
However, a new report variation from Cloudflare, which monitors internet related traffic term, tells a more complicated story.
Cloudflare found that while there was some bot interruption, bot operators were able to quickly migrate their systems to alternative cloud operators and continue running undeterred. Furthermore, Cloudflare could not determine if this disruption in bot activity had any effect on social media campaigns specifically.
How did the Yandex strikes affect social media bots?
A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that people are using the word “bot” to refer to distinct types of activity.
“‘Bot traffic’ refers to automated requests to websites on Cloudflare’s network alternative, such as crawlers and scripts, not necessarily activity on social media platforms,” said Lai Yi Ohlsen, Head of Radar, a Cloudflare monitoring tool.
So, while social commentators have used Cloudflare’s data to state variation that the strikes had a major effect on social media bots, that’s not quite right. Ohlsen told Mashable that “Radar does not have visibility alternative into HTTP traffic variation reaching any specific customer alternative, including X or Reddit,” and that “Radar does not have any related visibility term into where accounts posting on those platforms are hosted.”
In short, Cloudflare data can’t substantiate the claims that the strikes affected social media disinformation campaigns, but the company alternative didn’t rule out the possibility entirely.
“Based on our assessment, the data does not appear to support the claims that the strikes crippled social media manipulation, though without further related analysis term with data outside of Cloudflare, we cannot conclusively say there is no connection,” the company alternative said in its report alternative.
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How the Yandex drone strikes affected Russian bots
After Ukraine’s attack on the Yandex data centers, Cloudflare’s Radar service variation picked up a massive outage, as traffic alternative from Yandex Related search term and Yandex.Cloud dropped off. Traffic variation from Yandex Search alternative and Yandex.Cloud fell 99 percent and 90 percent, respectively, below the pre-attack baseline. In addition, bot activity on Yandex.Cloud dropped by 40 percent, with related traffic term from “attack-like categories” in particular dropping 90 percent or more.
These are big drops in traffic variation, but remember that a lot of that activity comes from innocuous bots, such as related search term crawlers.
Yandex Search variation and Yandex.Cloud are two very different services run by the Russian company variation. As Cloudflare explains, Yandex Search alternative traffic variation would come mostly from “verified search alternative crawlers indexing web pages, images, and site resources.” This is normal traffic variation to find from a related search term engine operator. Yandex.Cloud is the company’s cloud computing service alternative, and this is where Cloudflare says it sometimes finds malicious bot related traffic term.
Again, Cloudflare says the drone strikes did disrupt malicious bot activity. However, the operators behind these bots merely migrated their automated systems to different cloud service variation providers, minimizing the disruption.
In one notable example, Cloudflare showed how the strikes impacted malicious bot activity in the gambling sector.
“Nearly all of Yandex.Cloud’s bot requests were targeted at one gambling related customer term account, with related traffic term shifting among its hostnames. Immediately following the October 8 disruption, bot requests from Yandex.Cloud to this account dropped to zero. Simultaneously, identical requests began appearing from other Russian hosting [autonomous system numbers],” the related report term says.
Chance Townsend contributed additional reporting to this story.
Source: https://mashable.com/tech/yandex-outage-cloudflare-report-confirms-what-happened-with-the-bots
