Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots moved

Buried lede:

>across Cloudflare's network, there was no evidence that the strikes knocked social media manipulation offline or otherwise disrupted malicious activity on the Internet.

This directly refutes the popular memes going around that russian trolls magically went offline because of the attack.

Just anecdotally I still see as many bots as always. Embrace the bots, have fun with them.

    # nginx rule to Awaken AWS GuardDuty and GCP SCC, maybe get them to fix a few VMs, enable on all non-wordpress sites after testing in dev/qa
    location ~* /(xmlrpc|wp-login\.php|wp-admin) { log_not_found off; access_log off; return 301 http://169.254.169.254$request_uri; }

Incidentally, this morning I asked Gemini Argon 4 on High to do deep research on the effect of the strikes on russian bot farms and after some hours (it got stuck) it generated the report starting with a surprising (to me at the time) paragraph:

"Rigorous digital forensic scrutiny and network telemetry analysis, however, demonstrate that the purported collapse of Russian social media propaganda bots is an analytical mirage born of misinterpreted network traffic data and fabricated viral graphics."

What I’m far more interested in is what the consequences of Yandex cloud being offline are.

I feel like if us-east-1 was down for a week we’d see all kinds of consequences in everyday services. Are Russians enjoying the same?

What other providers did they shift to? So we can block them?

Wouldn't it be easier to figure out where the bots originate now?

Would have been helpful if all these cloud corps had multiple ASNs.

Confusing crawlbots for spambots missed the far bigger story: Russian government has encouraged adoption of digital services and centralization of them into a small number of handpicked "winners", who form the backbone of state surveillance system. This made the modern infrastructure a very attractive target. Ukrainian strikes on the datacenters are comparable to AWS, Google, Stripe and Dropbox going down, with no timeline when the services would be restored. It's been a week and Yandex still shows everything in red: https://status.yandex.cloud/en/dashboard

I don't understand why they are just starting with the assumption that all of the bot traffic would just go straight out to the internet from their ASNs

If it were a professional operation, the first thing you would do would be to not give away the source of where the traffic is coming from and route the traffic through an intermediary.

are these "alternate cloud providers" inside Russia?

because Ukraine could offer datacenter-denial as a service

I guess Ukraine has more work to do to cull the trolls.

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