Of course they have bots... That's how you index the web.
If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!
Indexing is also probably a low priority task, so if half their datacenter capacity is taken offline, their bot traffic probably reduces by more than 50%.
"We should be able to handle a long term net-split" was always part of my emergency plan for every service I worked on. (ie. Imagine all Comms between the Americas and the rest of the world cut for weeks)
Pretty likely to happen if there is a major war or political upheaval to require the internet be cut in two. I didn't require the service had no downtime, but that it was reasonably possible to restore service within a few hours.
Things contributing to that are you should have either live data or a backup in similar geo location to the user. Both the data and the crypto keys. Same for the code. And you should build your service simple enough that someone else who has never seen it before can deploy it and get things at least mostly working. Things like terraform are good for that - and it dramatically reduces employee training too.
> a quick fyi: in a total war everything is a valid military target
this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions, even in WW2 people pushed back on some things their government decided to do, like firebombing large civilian centers
hospitals and water facilities are easy examples, which Israel is very guilty of violating in recent years
Dresden and Hamburg, by the UK and Americans, public outcry saw this tactic end
WW2 is arguably bad example because everyone was committing crimes against humanity, worst thing humans ever did do, and today we're doing a lot of the same things that got us there
Do you have any sources on this? Would be interesting to read that perspective. Coincidentally read an article [0] on the bombings of Hamburg 2 days ago. As far as I know it was the tactic the US and UK employed until the very end of the war. Dresden was 2-3 months before the end of the war. The bombing of Hamburg was 2 years earlier.
The "tactic" of committing war crimes? How exactly does the date make indiscriminately killing civilians more legitimate? If the bombings had targeted military installations or even civilian targets of strategic importance (which would technically still be a war crime) it would be a different story, but targeting innocent civilians in their sleep isn't really debatable.
I have no idea how you could interpret my comment to think that I'm trying legitimizing bombing civilians.
The parent said "public outcry saw this tactic end".
To my knowledge, it didn't end. That's why I asked for sources and explained how Dresden happened at the very end of the war, where they still employed the tactic, that OP said was ended because of public outcry.
> this is not true, war crimes exist and have legal definitions
That is why total wars are distinguished from a normal war. The concept that "all civilian infrastructure supports the war effort" is used in a total war to justify firebombing civilians.
I would just like to point out that the court that prosecutes war crimes was just hit with even more sanctions from the US, with the justification that "nobody will hurt American citizens", buy the guy who indirectly ordered the bombing of the school.
Legal definitions are pretty worthless if nobody gets prosecutesd.
>data centers are dual use technologies now and valid military targets
proclaimed by who? Even the "international order" would disagree, as Yandex Cloud wasn't providing their services to any military companies per my knowledge.
Yandex Cloud was bombed symmetrically. Ukraine made no attempt in targeting MSK-IX, which could be a real military target.
Datacenter hosts Russian bots that comment on western social media. Disrupting Russian propaganda online weakens the Russian military. A crushing defeat for Trump in the mid terms is a military boost for Ukraine.
Google and Amazon abide by US sanctions - if these are Russian firms, it’ll take much longer to get bespoke approval to pay AWS or GCP.. my org is smaller than those and we just outright banned Russian companies after Ukraine was invaded. Too much of a headache and too risky.
Aim a laser at it at a well-chosen frequency (or just use one high enough that nothing reflects it, you don't have to go that high for that), send up a couple kilowatts of power, and just wait. The cooling will not compensate and just heat the satellite to 1000 degrees or so. If needed do it for a week, a month (assuming 10W laser power isn't outright enough to destroy the solar panels or antenna or some other critical component)
Yes, I get that aiming it is pretty hard, but we've hit far smaller targets.
Eh. I would call several of the Middle-East countries that got their data centers smushed as "politically stable." They just got into bed with the wrong ally, I guess?
These countries measure processes in decades. Their rulers are not up for election. They can go through huge (sometimes futile), multi-year projects and processes which would not survive any regime change in the west. They are willing to pay a price to assure their independence from Iranian influence - they pushed and encouraged this war in the first place.
They are not politically stable, quite the opposite: weak states held together by single sector revenues.
Right after Ukraine war started, I started maintaining a map of next flashpoints: got a hit on Arabian peninsula + Iran, Venezuela, India/ Pakistan.
Israel and Gaza were a surprise.
Eastern flank (Finland/ Baltics/ Poland/ Romania is in a slow burn.
Still waiting for Taiwan, south china sea and Singapore/Malaysia+ Indonesia - but that will be the big one, and actually the conflict for the straits (Malaca and Sunday) may have gotten invalidated by the Iran mess.
> I would call several of the Middle-East countries that got their data centers smushed as "politically stable."
That's the lie that the US and most other Western countries have told themselves ever since the discovery of oil turned what used to be nomads herding camels and catching fish into the thriving petrostates they are today.
Most of MENA is only stable on paper, that stability being heavily dependent on oil and gas production providing giant slush funds to citizens and a horde of exploited migrant and seasonal workers providing for daily needs. That's why they all went into tourism so hard over the last two-ish decades, they know that the fossil fuel reserves are eventually going to deplete and worldwide demand collapsing with them, and that's why everyone but Iran eventually made their peace with the existence of Israel despite sometimes heavy opposition of the population, and that's why there's still barely any opposition to the US and Israel waging war against Iran, and that's why most of MENA militaries but Iran and Israel's are utterly useless as well - a capable military would be able of coup'ing away the ruling kleptocracy.
And now the MENA countries are in for a wild ride. The Mullahs are sadly far from gone, the Western world is busy weaning itself off of oil and gas following the Russian aggression against Ukraine and the price shocks related to that plus the Iran war, tourists won't come back in meaningful numbers likely for a decade if not longer.
I agree, but the way they have gone at it is about the dumbest and incompetent way to do it. A blunder of historic dimensions, I'd even say Vietnam made more sense.
Logic says google bots do not come disguised, but as google agents.
Or is there other information?
Now there is probably also AI agent spam from google, but not at this level I believe. Also I am not fully clear what they count as spam, I doubt they would include google in this list, so do they include yandex bots here, if they come officially?
There's also the very well known inverse phenomenon of absolutely non-google people trying to disguise their crawler as a googlebot useragent, which has been a thing since at least... 15 years now?
I am unsure what you're trying to say. But it seems like you don't understand what Bot means in general and how is it specifically defined for the metric provided in that page.
From that pages point of view, a Google bot, Yandex bot, or your uncle Tom's AI agent spam is the same, a bot.
If official yandex bots ain't included in this data here - then it means spam/scam bots come indeed from yandex servers. As they stopped working, when the yandex data center was hit.
Yandex has cloud offering, their servers are used for actual bot traffic, not just crawlers. Yandex hasn’t been only a search company for a very long time.
I've reported high-volume exploit scanners multiple times, and when expiring blocks a week later, they typically would show up & resumt with the same IP at some point.
Maybe they'd care if the account was using a stolen credit card and there was a chance they wouldn't get their money, but they definitely do not care otherwise for normal people like me. I'm sure that'd be different if it's a multinational or a country-level government body is reporting something, but I can't get those to do my bidding.
Right, because I've had such outstanding results getting in touch with actual humans from Google when reporting abusive traffic directed towards my IP ranges. Top tier attention from people who really care.
I always wondered why every single western country is subjected to a constant stream of the same simplistic and generic anti immigration comments, regardless of the country. It's as if suddenly everyone from Poland to Portugal had the same moron racist uncle flooding their social media service of choice. There is also and always a russian-backed populist far-right emergent political party posting PG-13 versions of the same posts pushed by these bots.
I wonder what kind of fluctuation we will see in these bots traffic.
Its a deliberate attack being done by actors such as Elon musk. How you say? They are making the world think bots and AI automation are ok by supplying basic tools to help everybody scrape while they use technology 100x far more advanced to make everybody else's scraping pointless. They are making all Americans fight with each other and then using their huge data centers to harvest all of the data and keep users on their social media platforms. They basically use a fake Twitter account to "retweet" everybody's news or information and take it off their website into the social realm. They are delibertly sending more and more bots into the world so that they aren't noticed as much. If they didnt.. everybody would be pissed at their AI slop. People like ai meta have far advanced residential ips setup almost undetectable while all the new scraper people are easily detected but their ego and greed will not let them stop.. They are being trained to think it's ok to bot another person and steal their stuff because it's "seo" and "not illegal" "if I don't. Somebody else will" the bad actors here are Elon musk and Meta AI. There is no doubt about it. Don't be fooled by this fraud. Their setups to run their bots is easily 100000 a month... And nobody will be able to compete at that scale and expertise without just getting blocked.
They say it's 60% percent but that's not even close to the truth. In my niche the bots are now about 100 to 1. Yes. For every 1 visitor I get it's 100 automated bots using different ips.. after tracing most of them with fingerprint analysis.. the main culprits are Facebook and Elon musk. Meta is using something called "muse ai" to feed all the data from these bots and Elon musk appears to be channeling everything to x. I think that's what the X logo stands for.. the stocks and market.. everybody going down while he goes up.. the X is their plan on the economy and I just told you for fact how they are doing it.. yet all the morons who have been doing Internet work for 3 years are incapable of understanding. They just hire an Indian worker to fuel the fire
Absence of bot traffic is secondary to the absence of nearly all Yandex traffic in general, bot or not, as a result of the datacenter being down. Which is certainly newsworthy.
Your initial submission title sounded as if Yandex DC was used as a bot attack and because they were down, bot traffic in the whole internet was substantially down.
Don't worry, now that Trump started protecting the refineries, the other data centers will be hit sooner rather than later.
All those fresh fp2 drones can't go to waste.
The only question is whats next - power plants? Water treatments? Heating somewhere up north?
The HTTP traffic from Yandex is down to ~ 0 % after the third strike, after the first two strikes already degraded it. I wonder how this looks like at the network level because their search page still serves, but presumably their crawler is inactive now
Edit: Here is some more info, they do have availability issues as is to be expected
> Because three of its primary facilities were knocked offline within four days, Yandex’s failover mechanisms broke down[1][8].
> Outages have cascaded across Yandex Go (taxis), Yandex Pay, food delivery, smart home platforms, internal logistics, and third-party corporate services hosted on Yandex Cloud[2][7]. Problems have spilled into neighboring countries using these systems (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Serbia)[2][7].
Edit 2: Here is the Yandex Cloud status page, their GCP/AWS equivalent. The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup
I don't know how useful it will be as a case study since an HA/Ops person in (let's say, the US, Canada, AU, western european countries) has access to do things like buy hypervisor capacity or colocation in just about any location. I could go buy colo in Brussels or Panama City or San Diego or Edmonton or Melbourne tomorrow by contacting the right people.
The Russians are much more restricted from doing anything geographically outside of their own borders (for very well justified sanctions reasons), so their limitations are not the same as an HA person in almost any other country. Maybe some Iranian HA/Ops people will be comparing notes with them.
Sometimes there exist data or processing residence requirements that bind you to a specific region (e.g. EU-only). Also, „all AZs in this region no longer exist“ is not on everyone‘s bingo card, this is a good reminder why multi-AZ deployment in the same region may be not enough.
For data center guys this is definitely a case study, because drone attacks are probably on the threat list for everyone now, for various reasons, including domestic terrorism and hybrid warfare. If you want to defend your investment, time to think what covers you from the air.
It heavily depends on "what kind of DC". A lot of current DCs are not really well protected against a lot of known threats - and that's just a design tradeoff.
High value data is already protected a bit better (or at least should be - the usual trend, management gets lazy when nothing blows up). I'm old enough to have sat in the meetings for "so, apparently a plane crashing into one or more of our locations is a viable risk now" - and a DC hardened for "somebody tries to land a 747 on that thing" should also survive a small drone with a bit of explosives.
While for the younger ones the "we lose several availability zones within days" is a new thing now - it really isn't. We were planning for that back then as well, just that we didn't call it "availability zone" or "cloud" yet.
It's an open question at what point we'll start seeing small fiesty startups that want to sell you a privately owned air defense system for your datacenter roof. The tech to do it is probably far ahead of the regulatory regime to own and operate autonomous small radar+SAM batteries.
It will require some involvement of state, but it is plausible, that critical infrastructure will be required to have this covered and certain big, licensed private contractors may be able to operate air defense systems on such sites (do you smell the money and lobbying effort?).
Also this may influence the design of such data centers. A drone that a paramilitary group can build is not very sophisticated and won’t carry big payloads. Put an outer concrete shell or some better passive defense, and maybe that will be enough.
As a result of some of my work only slightly related to telecom/internet infrastructure, I happened to get on the marketing lists for about six different Chinese companies that will gladly sell you a full size Shahed-136 clone complete with 2 stroke petrol motor. I wouldn't say that small paramilitaries being only able to fly a 5-10kg max size quadcopter with a munition on it into a datacenter is the limit of possible future capabilities. These things are cheaply made in fiberglass molds and look to be dead simple. They're already showing demo videos of them flying around with very low cost ardupilot capable flight controllers.
They even advertise the airframe and motor packages on Instagram....
Yes, spend 10-100x more on 24x7 IT support for it, fiber from two different providers and take care of physical security of the server room. And when there‘s fire, you still need a cloud backup.
It was clearly meant as an example of the ease of a non-russian company buying geographically-distributed services in the global marketplace, not "I could go buy this with a few docusign signatures and SWIFT wire transfers tomorrow". I am not in the market for colo in Panama City or Melbourne. I don't think it's a bad thing that the russians are hampered by many limitations but whatever lessons their HA people are learning these days are probably very specific to a sanctioned Russia.
Unironically yes, if you're just a typical B2B SaaS who doesn't have "datacenter getting hit by a literal missile" in your threat model, this coupled with offsite backups is probably the logical DR plan for that scenario.
I don't think there is much you can do about being targeted by a military, simply because of how unique the attack vector is.
Hacking is smart but happens through software, so if you have hardware (i.e. physical) barriers, that stops the hacking.
Natural disasters happen physically but they are dumb, so if you have software redundancy (i.e. by copying the data to multiple locations), that stops them from destroying everything.
A military is both physical AND smart. They can target multiple locations at once and destroy whole buildings.
A very naive take from someone who clearly lives in a place where people have real choices, economic freedom, freedom of movement, and a government that protects them. "Just shut it down, bro" risks destroying your livelihood and leaving your family financially stranded, and yourself incarcerated or sent to the war zone. And it's not like Yandex develops weapons of mass destruction, you probably assume it's a collaboration even if Yandex simply hosts the Defense Ministry's websites. No sane parent will put their family at risk for this kind of stuff. "I'm going against the government for abstract ethical reasons" is something very few people/countries can afford.
And you can't shut it down anyway. The government will just nationalize it and keep it running. As long as you're the one in charge, you can at least throw a few hidden obstacles in the way, like dragging out legal processes.
No, a pretty informed take from someone who had family members that once upon a time made some very tough choices because they thought it was the right thing to do.
You can pretend at being ethical and moral as long as there is no price to pay, but when the time comes that it matters there will always be a price tag. Whether you are prepared to pay or not is what defines whether you are ethical or just pretending.
Company execs make decisions, employees make decisions, everybody carries a part.
Yandex is a part of Russia's military. Just the same as Google, MS, Amazon etc. provide services for the US military. Google et al. are probably in the critical path of defence for most European countries as well, insane though that is.
Not defending Yandex here, but I think their military involvement might be as accidental as of an American farmer whose beef landed in the cantina of aircraft carrier. Government and military procurement in Russia is its own universe, with strong players having specific IT expertise and capable of building DCs and tech. Assuming that everywhere in the world it’s the same as in America is wrong. Consumer tech companies aren’t operating this way usually, it is the scale of American Big Tech that allows them to compete with traditional contractors.
In general it’s the price of working with government, also see AWS Bahrain. I wonder if their insurance actually pays out because those are not officially wars there so hopefully they could recover some what from the insurance.
AWS plays both sides in that conflict since they're also a supplier for Israel. Presumably the aggressive side got them more profit than the defensive side cost them.
Is it just me, or didn't we just see a single company cause a bit of a dustup when they refused to provide certain services to a military that wanted to bomb another country?
If it doesn't sound like something in the control of a single individual company, perhaps you have something distorting your hearing.
You can learn to quickly diversify availability (or at least data safety) beyond the region of conflict when a kinetic war breaks out. The moment “kinetic sanctions” became the strategy, the risk to data centres should have been self-evident. And if it wasn’t immediately obvious, it should have been blindingly so when targeting expanded from oil refineries to Wildberries warehouses.
Wildberries warehouses were filled with flammable items boxed up in cardboard, packed for maximum efficiency and no wasted space. They were tinderboxes.
A datacenter is filled with server racks that wouldn’t burn as readily as cardboard. The fire videos I see of this datacenter don’t look as good as the Wildberries videos.
That said, I wish the Russian people good luck with booking their taxis and Yandex employees luck with finding RAM.
I don‘t think you can build a new data center in such a short time frame that passed since attacks on WB, definitely not when you can source hardware only from the black market.
I’m not describing what Yandex should do, but rather what their customers should do. Whether that means diversifying to eastern Russia, or China, or Belarus, I don’t know what options exist.
I feel like this isn't even a particularly new thing. I worked at a medium-sized SaaS company and we did disaster recovery drills for moving our stack from eu-west-1 to eu-central-1 in case something catastrophic happened in Ireland. If you want HA, you kinda have to assume that any single country in the world can have some kind of a crippling disaster. Unfortunately for Yandex's clients, Yandex only has regions in two countries, and not that many regions either.
The KZ region wasn't intended for Russia's entire workload, that's a secondary region with better Central Asian access.
If what you deduct were correct, Yandex would not be telling its customers to switch to competitora like VK Cloud. They even have a "priority onboarding code" called "CloudBro" for three competitors.
I predict a great many more videos coming out of Russia of Firepoint UAVs flying into refineries and such, punctuated by background audio commentary that can be summed up as "cyka blyat"
*Sudden drop in Cloudflare bot traffic from AS13238 YANDEX — Yandex LLC
UPD Definition of bot traffic from Cloudflare's glossary:
>Bot vs. human traffic
>The percentage of HTTP requests classified as bot versus human, based on bot scores. Requests with a bot score between 1 and 29 are classified as likely automated (bot), while requests with a score of 30 or above are classified as likely human. For more information, refer to Bot classes.
>By default, Radar shows bot vs. human traffic for requests to HTML content. This filter is meant to represent traditional web traffic by excluding API calls, asset requests (images, scripts, fonts), and other machine-to-machine requests.
I can’t believe there are so many dumb comments in this thread.
All it shows is that crawling from Yandex search engine stopped from one Yandex data center ASN.
No one runs opinion/malicious bots from data center IPs that people mention here.
On the other hand there are plenty of datacenter located command/control systems that puppeteer vast fleets of residential proxies (and Russia is by no means the only one doing so), so it will be very telling to see what social media accounts go silent over the coming days and weeks.
> from one Yandex data center ASN
This is only one of two extant Yandex ASN, not an ASN specific to one geographic region/datacenter.
So cloudflare https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d shows 40% of worldwide bot traffic is from the us and <1% is from Russia. So what is this chart of traffic from russias search engine supposed to show?
Yandex is a search engine like Google is a search engine. Both are also cloud vendors. The chart of traffic from Yandex is showing that the majority of traffic was considered bot traffic, and after Ukraine's attack on its datacenter(s), that traffic has reduced substantially.
It looks like the majority of online bot traffic is coming from cloud vendor networks, which isn't surprising to me. But it makes me think that the "bot share by location" chart is more useful as a "which cloud vendor has bad bot control" chart vs. a "where is bot traffic coming from" chart.
Their latest consumer plan includes "Super Duper Bot Fight Mode", which lets you drone strike one data center in a sanctioned country of your choosing.
For additional strikes or to upgrade to ICBM-based payloads, you'll have to contact them to set up an enterprise plan.
Everyone is mentioning crawlers, but wouldn't most traffic from a datacenter's ASN usually be bots just in general given that there's not many humans there to generate human traffic?
Here's an example French hosting company which has something like 14.8% "human" traffic, (the Yandex is under 5% human) though how much of that is actual humans and not advanced things puppeteering headless browsers is another question.
Apart from the correct argument that a search engine like Yandex will have crawlers, I would not be surprised if Western AI companies also used Yandex to scrape covertly.
Nvidia tried to pay off the Russian Anna's Archive for stolen data:
It's interesting (but not surprising) that so much traffic comes from the Netherlands and Singapore despite their sizes compared to the countries at the top of this list.
While not necessarily related to bot traffic, but I was thinking that in the age of AI perhaps we'll be comparing technological development of countries based on their usage of AI per capita (similar to what we have with electricity usage per capita).
I was thinking, we should all contribute to a Yandex fund for the Ukrainian mil to help keep the level of bot activity on the rest of the internet under control!
I think this really highlights the changing face of war.
It's hard to go to war now when your enemy can just use a few small drones to take out everything your citizens care about in a single day (social media, online deliveries etc).
And these things are practically irreplaceable in a war when you're sanctioned up the wazoo. Where are you buying racks of Xeons and DDR5 RAM and Nvidia GPUs?
Slightly misleading. The filter is literally bot traffic from Yandex's AS. Of course it goes down when 3 of 5 DCs is down. But if you filter by country, there's no noticeable dip.
I'm going to be really interested how much this cleans up the internet, I mean the damage is done if you read comment sections on youtube etc, but let's see how long the BS persists.
Continue to live in your parallel universe created for you by your government.
Most people who are commenting and whose mouth you shut with your greasy laps, are simply Russians who are sick and tired of your antirussian chauvinism disguised as pursuing justice (Venezuela, Iran just the most recent examples of this "pursuing").
I am from western Europe, by the way, and can't wait for the moment you take your drones and submarines and get the hell out of here.
Of course they have bots... That's how you index the web.
If we took Google offline I bet there would also be a reduction in bot traffic from them too!
Indexing is also probably a low priority task, so if half their datacenter capacity is taken offline, their bot traffic probably reduces by more than 50%.