Malicious Russian disinformation bot traffic barely flinches after Ukraine strikes Yandex data centers and auto-migration kicks in
Ukraine's strikes on Russian data centers have caused legitimate bot traffic to go down, but malicious bots remain operational.
Russian bot traffic experienced a temporary slowdown following Ukraine's strikes on Yandex data centers, but it quickly migrated to other hosting providers like Radist and Selectel, according to Cloudflare's analysis. While the attacks have diminished overall bot traffic from Russia, malicious bots continued to operate through alternative ASNs, keeping Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud's traffic levels at 10% to 15% of normal.
Cloudflare noted that this migration was evident in a gambling sector customer that saw malicious bot requests drop to zero from Yandex.Cloud but increased on other networks. Russian bot traffic targeting social media platforms also showed minimal impact, with only a 0.6% decrease in traffic from Russian-origin IPs, while bot activity on "post," "reply," and "like" functions decreased by 5.7%.
Cloudflare concluded that the theory of social media manipulation dropping due to Ukrainian strikes is debunked, emphasizing that cloud-based workloads are easily transferable between data centers, rendering disruptions temporary.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
