r/SipsTea • u/Previous_Month_555 • 4h ago

Feels good man Russian disinformation bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple Russian data centers.

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27

u/greihund 3h ago

I'm going to go ahead and say that disinformation bot traffic has not been nearly eliminated. It has been dented, but it's still going strong. The narrative that it has been completely dismantled is itself disinformation, meant to make you complacent and let your guard down. You want it to be that easy. Social media bot servers can - and do - run thousands of accounts from a closet. It is not a centralized affair.

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u/calladc 3h ago

cloudflare radar showing 0.5% of normal Russian bot traffic is active since the attacks.

it's a lot of traffic

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u/[deleted] 3h ago edited 3h ago

[deleted]

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u/MapleYamCakes 2h ago

Let’s not forget the CrowdStrike outage in 2024 that directly or indirectly impacted everyone on earth who utilizes internet-connected systems.

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u/vancitydreamer 3h ago

How do you check that? I'd love to see it

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u/calladc 3h ago

https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as13238?dateRange=7d

you can see them slowly stitching it back together.

https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/as13238?dateRange=7d

this is the bgp/routing "node" (ASN) that yandex operates inside their largest datacenter. they've been announcing updated routes to seemingly move shit around in last 24 hours but seems slow moving. they tried to move everything last night but reverted

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u/vancitydreamer 3h ago

Thank you!

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u/SwimmerQuick1500 2h ago

Why is it that I click your link and click on Russian federation which is the level above https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d

It appears pretty normal?

How did you make the conclusion that Yandex was the Russian bot question?

Genuinely curious because using radar.cloudflade, it says on Russian federation under "Bot traffic share by autonomous system" and it has PJSC Rostelecom at 14% and Yandex at 6.2%. I changed the timeline to before the outage and it's 13% to 9.4%.

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u/calladc 2h ago

aa13238 is a routing node inside Russia that is specifically in the yandex datacenter that got attacked.

Russia is fine because all the nodes and peers are active minus one. technically if the DC wasn't on fire they could push the routes through peers or backup links at the same dc

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u/SwimmerQuick1500 2h ago

I get that but how are you determining that is the Russia disinformation bot traffic and not any of the other nodes?

The graph you linked just says Yandex is down which I'm not questioning. We can see in the Russian federation graph a level above Yandex that Russian bot traffic has hardly changed.

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u/calladc 2h ago

the graph specifically tracks Russian bots from that bgp node

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u/SwimmerQuick1500 2h ago

But when I click on Russian federation, a level above containing all the nodes, theres not really in difference in bot traffic.

So again yes Yandex is down but at most Yandex held 10% of bot traffic for the entire Russian federation.

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u/calladc 2h ago

it's the node specifically that the conversation is about. not all of Russia

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u/AmountNew2152 3h ago

So, we know that something blew up that was using a lot of data. But we really don't have any idea what sort.

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u/calladc 2h ago

it's cloudflare. that's every bot that's using cloudflares service. the biggest web service provider on the planet.

they're the leaders in web application firewall services on the planet and are extremely active in global cyber security.

they're one of the most trusted resources on these subjects. the fact it was automated and updated within seconds of the attack was telling that both the AS node went down and all monitored bots stopped at the same time is not consequential

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u/AmountNew2152 2h ago

Agreed! But we don’t know what they were doing. AFAIK those misinfo bot farms aren’t anywhere close to there. Heck, many aren’t in Russia.

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u/calladc 2h ago

have you ever known though? does that detail change that bot traffic has stopped and suddenly there's a lot less awful shit going around the Internet?

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u/AmountNew2152 2h ago

I haven’t noticed any interruptions. I wish I could claim otherwise. But I do agree and understand the evidence. It’s getting Ukraine positive play in the west regardless, so it’s a good use of media.

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u/adoodas 2h ago

Why does the us just allow this to happen... Dems don't say a word about it

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u/calladc 2h ago

what? it's a Russian datacenter on Russian territory

2

u/calladc 2h ago

what? it's a Russian bgp routing station