Yandex bot traffic down 99% after data center attack
radar.cloudflare.com
radar.cloudflare.com
The interesting aspect is this: Yandex was taken from its owners semi-consensually. Similarly, the original owner of the troll farms was blown up in a business jet. He staged a mutiny cause his dirty bloody business was about to be taken from him non-consensually. Some other large non-consensual takeovers unfold for 5 years, soon 6.
What an appetite!
Yevheniy Prigozhin, of Wagner PMC fame lately (and ultimately):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yevgeny_Prigozhin
> Not sure if troll farms got affected in any way, that is a different business entirely, no overlap.
Was a different business. Before the "consensual" takeover.
After the takeover, there's only one business that matters: do what they tell you.
It all feels so farcical to the extent that it feels like it was either staged somehow, or they took enough of his family hostage to leave him no other choice.
Because you can't be that stupid and live to be that high and that old in Putin's regime.
Reminds me of when 4channers said 4chan's daily interracial posting went way down on October 7, 2023. (It didn't.)
I could believe this, but not before I see a good empirical analysis. Until then, it just feels like typical folk gossip.
People have been problematic since recorded time, and the whole "well X% of internet traffic is bots!" doesn't mean the % you're interacting with is just that.
99.99% (totally made up for example) of the emails I am probably sent are spam, those are filtered automatically before I even see them by the various email providers, and of the remaining .01% some still slips through.
I feel that there's somewhat of a similar disconnect between "x amount of traffic is bots" and people assuming that means that supposed ally who says horrible things is a bot (...or psyop..or false flag...or etc...)
Eg https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328006677_Weaponizi...
This is an easy topic to find empirical analysis.
yet to see any evidence of anything else going down
Seems to likely just be a standard socially constructed folk belief
Excuse the grammar.
[0] https://edmo.eu/publications/how-covid-19-conspiracy-theoris...
UK? Quite possibly. Given their recent admission (finally) around the Russian propaganda for Brexit
UK has no infra to target even their own missiles. They always had to use US!
I mean, sure, maybe some random person at the Pentagon could have done it but the US has not acted as a Ukraine ally for years now.
There's of course the obvious, low effort trolling, but I'd think there are also more subtle, maybe more intellectually equipped information warfare going on.
[1] https://www.dkriesel.com/_media/sonntagsfrage_wahl2025.png
This is just not how social media botting works. If you try to "bot" facebook, instagram or any major social network via browser from datacenter IP let alone ones from Russia you'll soon get all your accounts banned.
Social media are botted via apps on mobile phones set in large farms; read: thousands of mobile devices. They either jailbroken or have some advance automation.
Neither they use Russian IP. Instead they go for residential proxies kindly provided by Israeli firms where bandwidth cost a leg, but it worth it. Or they just use their own botnets instead.
They don't decide what to post independently. An orchestrating application is hosted somewhere, and that somewhere is Russia.
In Russia it's higher latency, way more expensive and there are lots of connectivity issues. Its not like Russia have ministry of social network botting that require to host it within country.
Reason why these bot networks are effective and hard to find is because it's not some "KGB" minister respobsibility.
Botnets, malware, botting in Russia is someone small criminal enterprises with a lot of people doing it independently. They might be affilated to government or not at all - might be they just sell services to highest bidder.
I'd say you never checked Yandex.Cloud pricing. That's just not true - it's not cheaper.
Putin seems to very much like control, and I doubt he would delegate control over foreign propaganda to agents outside Russia.
This is especially true if you want to spread a lie. Lies have to be coordinate, the truth does not.
Previously we can point to data and see things like Scotland Independence accounts all go quite on mass when Iran goes offline, or the OSRS player base go down and the gold price spike when Venezuela has a blackout.
I've seen no analysis connecting Yandex's sabotage to a drop in hate speech on the English speaking internet.
We genuinely have nothing but vibes now, as we have like 4 social media sites that have collectively decided to severely limit their APIs or straight up kill research-focused tools (like Facebook's own CrowdTangle) around 2023-2024.
Now one could just present a handful of consistently-vocal accounts that went completely silent in the last days.
My guess would be that there will be a significant change detected but Russian troll farms are not totally datacenter operated - it's still mostly ran by real office workers like in 1984. That being said, you still need datacenter compute for organizing even manual operations like this.
Many are (incorrectly) interpreting 'bot traffic' to mean something like "fake users on social media that leave comments and 'likes' supporting right-wing posts". (something Russian bots were accused of during the 2016 US presidential election)
But Yandex is like Russia's Google. Both Google and Yandex need to scrape the internet in order to index (no indexing means the site would not appear in search results).
So Yandex datacenters going down meant so too did their 'bots' that visit sites to index them. Nothing to do with 'bots' as per the Russia collusion allegations a la the 2016 election.
You'll also be surprised to observe sudden disappearance of both far right and far left.
¹ assuming this is possible. The goal should be the eradication of russian deep state
Something like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-military-laser-shoots-down-c...
So lasers or turrets can work if you want to defend a military base in the middle of a desert, but not something that can be deployed in cities.
Apparently, the most efficient method so far is interceptor drones.
They aren't fundamentally different from a bunch of assholes sitting in an airplane 25,000 feet above you, flying above the ceiling of your flak and air interceptors, dropping a few thousand tons of firebombs on your town.
> I'm curious about how to defend against such drones.
Looking at what most of their targets have in common, I'd say that there's an easy answer to that - don't start wars.
So, your easy answer is incredibly difficult.
2. Drones are more effective in an asymmetric fight. The stronger , more developed side gets hit harder. Which is why Russia and the US is having such a bad time with them. They are both starting shit with countries that have far less to lose, and have far more resolve to fight.
So yes, it is in fact a pretty easy answer.
Yandex is just a drop in the ocean bud.
No serious person would ever claim that Russian cyber influence operations were sending traffic directly from Russian IP addresses. That's 'Get Smart' levels of absurdity. It's as ridiculous as a Russian spy pretending to be an American while speaking with a thick Russian accent.
Yes, russia uses both farms and attempts to influence the public opinion, but guess what.
It makes me wonder whether activists should have been targeting these operations sooner. I had no idea they were so centralized.
https://bsky.app/profile/chadbourn.bsky.social/post/3mxmourr...
(and Zdechovsky is not a reliable source at all)
Out of curiosity, I just tried Gemini 4 Argon and it seems to have nailed it, decoding even your "illegible" words!
See: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts?state=%7B%22ids%22:%...