r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 18h ago

Society Ukraine Struck Yandex Data Centers, Russian Bots Went Silent—Now Questions Are Mounting

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraine-struck-yandex-data-centers-russian-bots-went-silent-now-questions-are-mounting-23339
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u/ididntseeitcoming 17h ago

That’s a very shallow explanation of what happened.

The MASSIVE decline in anti vax, pro Russian propaganda, and other various misinformation posts/comments is what should be troubling.

A large amount of absolute garbage on the internet is being fed to the entire western world by Russian bot farms. And we are eating it up like hot cakes.

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u/DigDugged 16h ago

Man, if the Russians were lobbing missiles at the U.S., we'd surely defend ourselves.

Kind of wild that we've given Russia unlimited access to mind control the west, with absolutely no defense or retaliation.

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u/CulturalKing5623 15h ago

Man, if the Russians were lobbing missiles at the U.S., we'd surely defend ourselves.

The Russian are providing direct intelligence to Iran so they can lob missiles at US troops in the region. We responded by buying diesel from them, giving them a financial lifeline in the war after we placed sanctions on Russia a couple months ago to prevent this exact thing from happening.

[The sanctions] directs Trump to impose up to 100% tariffs on the top five importers of Russian oil or natural gas, with an exception for countries that import less than 15% of Russia’s natural gas exports and have taken significant steps to reduce those imports.

So yeah, Russia is helping Iran target the US in the Middle East in our war of aggression, driving up the price of diesel in the US so now we're going to buy more Diesel from Russia so they can fund their war of aggression against out ally.

Oh and just for shits and giggles, Kash Patel, head of the FBI, is vising Moscow this week, one month out from the midterms.

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u/DigDugged 14h ago

When you describe it like that (I.e. accurately) it kinda sounds like a war that's happening all over the world. A World War if you like.

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u/Cheap_Picture5893 14h ago

The United States provides Ukraine with intelligence data, and Ukraine launches missiles at Russia.

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u/Uncle_Istvannnnnnnn 13h ago

Okay little Timmy time for today's lesson!

An Ally helping an Ally is good.

An Ally helping an enemy is bad.

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u/croc_socks 15h ago

The enemy of my enemies are my friends. 

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u/reddit001aa1 15h ago

The right wore t-shirts explaining they'd rather be Russian than democrat.

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u/obeytheturtles 13h ago

Would we? Feels like Trump would just say "don't look up" and half the country would do it, maybe under protest, but they'd still obey.

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u/quik69 15h ago

Do you have any actual data on this? Everything in the article about social media is speculation and everything I've seen is just people cheering for the rhetoric.

My understanding is that the kind of bots CloudFlare would monitor are mostly web crawlers/spiders along with with malware bots like port scanners and DDoS nets. Yandex servers may also host C2 infrastructure for social bot networks but CloudFlare wouldn't necessarily see the corresponding decline in social bot activity following strikes on this infrastructure.

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u/FlarkingSmoo 8h ago

Yeah, people are just running with this without really looking into it because it's a fun story. Yes Russia runs propaganda bots, but the idea that popping a few data centers had this huge effect doesn't really pass the smell test.

According to Mezha, the Rohtext project compared German-language posts on X across matching 18-hour weekend windows. Mentions of the AfD fell 19.3%, but mentions of the CDU fell 17.8%, the SPD 36.8% and the Greens 28.6%. The AfD showed no unique drop; the pattern looks like an ordinary weekend lull. A viral graphic showing falls of 30% and 56% cited no data source, account list, platform or counting method, and its timeline ran to October 15 even though it was posted on October 11. FactCheckRadar classified the causal link between the strikes and AfD-related activity as unsubstantiated.

https://ppc.land/yandex-crawler-traffic-drops-94-after-drone-strikes-on-3-data-centers/

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u/Halo_cT 9h ago

a lot of modern bot farms are racks and racks of old android and iphones each running a unique set of hardware addresses and official social media clients that look perfectly legitimate to meta, X etc. Those same companies also have a financial incentive to allow more users and engagement.

Cloudflare doesnt really monitor for this type of traffic. Other than the foreign IP it seems perfectly fine.

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u/TheG00dF1ght 15h ago

Can you cite your sources that show a decline in POSTING not in web traffic? I'd really like to see something more detailed than just http requests dropped.

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u/DrSlurp- 17h ago

Where do you get the information that traffic on these specific topics have decreased?

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u/[deleted] 17h ago

[deleted]

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u/PreviousCurrentThing 16h ago

If confirmed, this is telling

Great source.

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u/SufficientGreek 17h ago

There's no source for that graphic

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u/Agitated_Morning5005 17h ago

All the guy is posting is how bot crawler traffic is down, this is slop from people who don't understand how technology works

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u/DrSlurp- 16h ago

And where did that guy get that information?

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u/SirPseudonymous 13h ago

They made it up. The only actual facts here are that after a datacenter belonging to yandex (a search engine) was hit, traffic involving search indexer webcrawlers identifying themselves as belonging to yandex decreased.

It's already an established fact that most right wing astroturfing is from bot farms in Israel and the US, because no shit things that support the white supremacist oligarch ruling class in the US and that support the ongoing genocide in occupied Palestine are going to be pushed domestically by the local ruling class using local assets, not by a foreign power that's at odds with the ruling class this bullshit supports.

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u/Pretend_Sock7432 16h ago

I think it will be as with covid. We will see more numbers in comming days and weeks.

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u/Biopain 16h ago

There is basically none, its reddit propaganda

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u/Silly_Ebb_8745 16h ago

Yep, the takeaway is that what was mostly a meme with some truth to it is actually much, MUCH more prevalent than, really, anyone could have ever expected.

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u/Aranxi_89 16h ago

It's misinformation warfare. It's all in the Foundations of Geopolitics.

You can't kill America using external force. The only way is to make the people fight themselves.

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u/Think_Put8440 15h ago

Underrated comment. Dividing us has become an art form.

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u/Icy-Cry340 16h ago

For fuck’s sake not Dugin slop again.

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u/Orange_Tang 14h ago

I can't wait for the data analysis studies to come out on this. It will tell us exactly what BS Russia had been pushing. We all knew it was happening and I have a pretty good idea what it will be, but it will be nice to have some data proving it.

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u/Uncle_Istvannnnnnnn 13h ago

Do you have a link to any data on how much the decline was? I'm very interested in how big of a dip there was and where.

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u/FlarkingSmoo 8h ago

https://ppc.land/yandex-crawler-traffic-drops-94-after-drone-strikes-on-3-data-centers/

But the story about this is being blown out of proportion:

According to Mezha, the Rohtext project compared German-language posts on X across matching 18-hour weekend windows. Mentions of the AfD fell 19.3%, but mentions of the CDU fell 17.8%, the SPD 36.8% and the Greens 28.6%. The AfD showed no unique drop; the pattern looks like an ordinary weekend lull. A viral graphic showing falls of 30% and 56% cited no data source, account list, platform or counting method, and its timeline ran to October 15 even though it was posted on October 11. FactCheckRadar classified the causal link between the strikes and AfD-related activity as unsubstantiated.

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u/Uncle_Istvannnnnnnn 8h ago

Is a drop across all mentions not to be expected? As far as I understand it the playbook is to create tension between groups by pushing all sides towards conflict with each other. iirc there was an infamous example where pro-life and anti-abortion groups were manipulated into having protests in the same or near same location.

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u/RedditJumpedTheShart 16h ago

"These measurements show a sharp reduction in automated network activity, but cannot establish whether Russian propaganda bots disappeared or whether damaged infrastructure stopped generating ordinary automated traffic."

Do you have anything actually factual that proves this?

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u/Snoo-4249 15h ago

Look latam, definitely they're the only one using boting to change people perspective. /s

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u/BrianWonderful 14h ago

Not only that, but it becomes "content" that the big AI firms train their models on. So, this garbage data in from 'targetable' foreign data centers is going to be baked into AI models everywhere.

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u/DangKilla 11h ago

I feel like the general public is 10 years behind on everything. If we're lucky. They have us buried in information warfare, left versus right.

The bots have been around for over 10 years. Lookup the VICE documentary on the IRA Troll Farm.

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u/soapinthepeehole 10h ago

Obama tried to tell us this in 2016 and McConnell threatened to accuse him of playing politics to hurt republicans.

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u/reroll-life 46m ago

A large amount of absolute garbage on the internet is being fed to the entire western world by Russian bot farms

We knew this for decades. There are legit interviews with people working in propaganda farms, we have photos and analytics and proof etc. People just don't believe it for some reason.

I think russian technique of firehose of faleshoods is just so powerful. it's hard to attribute propaganda when it's not blatant "putin is great" but million variations of "everything is bad". It's low key evil genius.

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u/Mysterious-Tie7039 17h ago

Yup. They’re dismantling us from within.

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u/PreviousCurrentThing 16h ago

Why are you making it easier for the bots to hide by keeping your post history hidden?

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u/BawkSoup 16h ago

You act like its only the russians, or at least this post alone without any additional context makes me think.

sometimes people are so worried about pointing out russian bot farms, they turn a blind eye to at large digital security.

but youre just going to call me a sympathist or something.

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u/KubeGuyDe 16h ago

Maybe you're a bot from a western fsrm

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u/Icy-Cry340 16h ago

There was no decline in anything lol. Bot farms aren’t run through providers like Yandex. Pro-ru said the same stuff about pro-ua bots when Ukrainian datacenters were hit and that was BS too. Thats just not how these things operate.