Automated bot traffic from networks managed by Russian technology giant Yandex was reportedly almost entirely wiped out following Ukrainian drone strikes on the company’s data centers. Yandex, which is sometimes referred to as Russia’s Google, has seen its infrastructure targeted in tit for tat attacks by Kyiv in recent days following Russian strikes on Ukrainian data hubs over the last month. Data from Cloudflare, which handles networks for web traffic around the world, showed bot traffic from Yandex plummet to just 0.3% of its highest levels – down from 88% the week before – after Ukrainian strikes overnight from Saturday to Sunday on a major Yandex data center in Russia’s Vladimir region. That was the third such attack on Yandex data infrastructure by Ukraine in days, with Cloudflare data showing that bot traffic dropped significantly on Thursday, the day Ukraine launched its first attack on a data center used by the tech firm. The attack led to a halt to operations at the facility, which hosts two supercomputers used to train the company’s AI model. Ukraine then struck another Yandex data hub on Friday, with the company saying it was facing a difficult challenge to maintain its services, used by millions of Russians every day, Reuters reported. Internet monitoring group NetBlocks reported a “collapse” in Yandex’s networks on Sunday, with traffic linked to the Russian tech giant’s cloud services dropping to just 30% of previous levels. Russian trolls or harmless page indexing? Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking remotely at the Warsaw Security Forum on Monday, said “it suddenly became a little easier to breathe on many social media platforms” after Ukraine’s strikes hit Yandex data centers. While his comments appeared to suggest that the reduction in bot traffic affected accounts and content that spread disinformation as part of suspected so-called troll farms linked to Russia, internet monitoring groups and tech experts have said this is not necessarily the case. Instead, they say, the reduced bot traffic pertains to web crawlers or search engine bots – which Cloudflare defines as a “program that accesses, downloads, and/or indexes content” from across the internet. Zelenskyy said: “A lot of people noticed it, and there was less hate, less division, and fewer provocations because there were fewer bots, and it's pretty clear where those bots were coming from.” Although Cloudflare says that bots can be used for malicious activities – like breaking into accounts or sending spam – it says that bot traffic “describes any non-human traffic to a website or an app”, and that some bots are useful, such as those used to index content. The company’s chart showing the reduction in traffic says it concerns “HTTP requests from bots” and does not mention spam or disinformation activity. Since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the two countries have frequently targeted each other’s infrastructure as the war of attrition drags on. For most of the war, infrastructure targets have mainly been related to the military and energy sectors, but data centers appear to have now quickly become the latest pressure point as both sides look for an upper hand in the more than four-and-a-half-year long conflict. Ukrainian forces earlier this year began systematically targeting logistics centers used by Wildberries – Russia’s equivalent to Amazon – with Kyiv saying the retailer’s logistics network was being used to support the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine.
