Ukraine Figured Out How to Decimate Bots

First let me say that I am not suggesting you follow in their footsteps.

Ukraine is going after Russia’s infrastructure in the 4 year old war with Russia.

Yandex is Russia’s equivalent to Google, loosely. Their data centers run what is called bullet proof hosting – web servers that are immune to being seized by the FBI and other western law enforcement.

The first data center they hit was in Sasova, Russia on October 8th.

The second data center, 220 miles away, was hit on October 10th.

Since Russia severely restricts where data and services can be hosted, damaging or destroying these data centers and probably more importantly the tens of thousands of computers inside is a problem for them. Businesses can’t just migrate to another, say, Amazon data center elsewhere. They are just down for the duration until Yandex figures out how to recover. Likely, their data is gone too.

Traffic for the search engine has DROPPED by 99+ percent. Basically dead.

Russia has bombed several Ukrainian data centers, so this is likely retaliation.

Now Ukraine has hit a third Yandex data center, this time in Vladimir (I am sure the name is not a coincidence). That data center, reports say, has completely shut down and what is left is unstable. That leaves three more Yandex data centers covering the rest of the country. What do you think is next?

One of the attacked data center houses two of Yandex’s three supercomputers used to train AI. The Vladimir data center houses Galushkin, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the country.

Yandex hosts a lot of (most of?) the servers that generate bot traffic targeting fake social media posts, fake accounts and likely spam. The number of posts is down dramatically.

Yandex updated its terms of service to exclude any liability for outages due to drone attacks. They also are working with competitors to help customers move their data and services – assuming there is any data left to move.

The Russian defense department is trying to figure out how to better protect the few remaining Yandex data centers. If they do, maybe Ukraine goes after their competitors.

This is the new war. Robots firing weapons. Drones attacking critical infrastructure. Attacking data centers and telecommunications hubs. The old targets did not go away – fuel depots, refineries, bridges, ammunition dumps; they have just added new ones.

At least for now, bot traffic is down.

Credit: Tech Radar and The Record

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