Bot traffic from Yandex

(radar.cloudflare.com)

450 points | by walrus01 4 hours ago

34 comments

  • londons_explore 3 hours ago
    Yandex is Russian Google.

    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%.

    • cromka 3 hours ago
      I don't think these are the boys they refer to?

      EDIT: I was wrong, they're just generic bot vs human traffic numbers and you're right.

      • jquery 40 minutes ago
        This is devastating for Yandex. What does the SRE recovery plan even look like? “Raise shields”?
        • michelb 26 minutes ago
          Activate the failover datacenters in orbit :)
        • expedition32 22 minutes ago
          Build data centers in politically stable countries.

          Sure you cannot bribe anyone, actually have to pay taxes and can't install gas turbines but... they don't get blown up.

          • qingcharles 13 minutes ago
            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?
        • theplumber 36 minutes ago
          Put 90 percent energy into the shields!
        • verdverm 29 minutes ago
          Same for AWS Bahrain, data centers are dual use technologies now and valid military targets.

          https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

    • walrus01 2 hours ago
      The other Yandex AS which is their hosting/hypervisor platform, broadly similar to AWS, Azure, whatever also shows a major drop in bot traffic:

      https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as200350?dateRange=7d

      https://www.peeringdb.com/net/20950

    • asdfsa32 2 hours ago
      Don't let logic get in the way of a good propaganda.
      • lukan 2 hours ago
        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?

        • selcuka 40 minutes ago
          Google bots definitely come disguised, to check whether the web site serves different content to non-Google user agents.
          • walrus01 34 minutes ago
            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?
        • konart 2 hours ago
          Neither do Yandex bots. What's your point?
          • lukan 2 hours ago
            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.
            • asdfsa32 2 hours ago
              But what do you mean by "if"? It is a well defined metric and there is no "if".
            • konart 2 hours ago
              I'll just link this comment if I may: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50042416
              • lukan 2 hours ago
                Thank you, I missed that one (or it was not there when I started writing).

                So yandex bots are included and this metric says nothing about malicious yandex intent here.

        • asdfsa32 2 hours ago
          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.

          • lukan 2 hours ago
            I know what it means in general, but like I said indeed not "how is it specifically defined for the metric provided in that page."
      • caaqil 2 hours ago
        [flagged]
        • loeg 2 hours ago
          > HN is just filled with the same primitive tribal normies

          Yes, but it's mostly the opposite tribe of the one you're complaining about.

        • GlacierFox 2 hours ago
          Yeah for real, enlightened one. Russia is great by every metric /s.
        • 876433790 40 minutes ago
          [flagged]
        • Citizen_Lame 2 hours ago
          Will someone think of the Russkies.
          • kakacik 1 hour ago
            I keep thinking about them often, what a definition of cancer on modern humanity that country is. Not all people inside, far from it, but that country - absolutely, definitely and consistently.

            And most of those inside allowed this to happen over decades since even harsh dictatorships represent underlying population in many ways, many even cheered / still cheer on direction their country has taken, and non-trivial amount also like raiding neighbors for the kill, loot and money in general.

            A stark warning to US if you keep letting things slide to evil direction, this is roughly how you end up over time.

            • bruce415 48 minutes ago
              Oh, you sweet summer child. The US is already evil, after its own fashion.
              • CaptWorld 37 minutes ago
                This summer child hasn't touched grass if he thinks the US is eviler than the new axis regimes. If the US is evil then there's no meaning for the word evil anymore
                • Zetaphor 24 minutes ago
                  Do you guys not read the news, or study history?

                  We're putting immigrants in concentration camps and shipping them to African countries. We're talking about livestreaming an execution. We prioritize profit and over human life and dignity at every opportunity. We invade countries and murder civilians for profit and political gain. We invaded a country and kidnapped it's leader for oil. I can go on and on, I don't know what reality you're all in where the US isn't a cancer but it sounds a lot more pleasant than the one the rest of us are stuck in.

              • idiotsecant 39 minutes ago
                This phrase is so annoying. It's one millimeter up from just doing marvel movie quotes instead of typing your actual thoughts like a real live adult human.
            • influx 1 hour ago
              [dead]
        • wiseowise 1 hour ago
          > normies

          Touch grass.

      • wewxjfq 2 hours ago
        [flagged]
        • asdfsa32 2 hours ago
          Thanks for making it clear that you didn't look past the submission title.
      • notwatching 2 hours ago
        [flagged]
    • enopod_ 50 minutes ago
      I wonder how bot traffic on propaganda platforms like Twitter changed, but they probably won't give out any information anyway.
    • dgellow 2 hours ago
      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.
      • nik282000 2 hours ago
        Google hosts a significant number of bots. About half of my fail2ban list is google cloud IPs.
        • alephnerd 1 hour ago
          Of course they do, but they are quick with account bans when notified because of the liability issue unlike Yandex.
          • luckylion 1 hour ago
            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.

          • 876433790 39 minutes ago
            > liability issue

            Continue drinking the Google kool-aid

          • walrus01 1 hour ago
            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.

            /s

          • saghm 1 hour ago
            That must be why Google has such a stelly reputation for the quality of their support operations
    • AlienRobot 2 hours ago
      I wonder how this will affect the Yandex search engine. I think I've read they split the Russian one and .com, but I'm not sure.
    • DonHopkins 2 hours ago
      [flagged]
      • CoastalCoder 2 hours ago
        Can you point to a few comments that you consider examples?

        I've never noticed occurrences of such stuff, so I'm curious what I'm failing to key in on.

        Edit: and would someone mind explaining the downvotes? If they're meant to communicate something to me, I'm genuinely not understanding.

        • rpdillon 2 hours ago
          I like to study rhetoric, and appreciate folks asking for specifics. There's a lot of generalities thrown around on this forum that are highly questionable, and the only antidote I have is to request details. It's surprising how often folks resist.

          A sibling comment replying to you is using a familiar tactic, which is to try to shame you for asking for specifics, while simultaneously providing none and telling you that it's obvious.

          Occasionally people do provide details and I learn something, but that's not the common case, sadly.

        • wiseowise 1 hour ago
          > Can you point to a few comments that you consider examples?

          Just search for “Russia” on HN and follow threads. You’ll find lots of “what about West/Jews”, “Russia is fighting against NATO”, etc. Then open any western news outlet on YouTube and follow comments too.

        • BlackRabbit1 2 hours ago
          Post a controversial political statement and grab a beer.
          • p-e-w 2 hours ago
            Obviously. Because anyone who disagrees with the Western online consensus must be a bot, essentially by definition.
            • wiseowise 1 hour ago
              Would it please you if “useful idiot” would be used over bot when someone regurgitates Russian metodichkas?
          • braiamp 2 hours ago
            Ehh, there are enough humans that would do that. Don't delude yourself thinking that there are no people that hold such views.
            • rokkamokka 2 hours ago
              That's half the point of the bots though, to spread the propaganda to other people so they spread it as well
              • p-e-w 2 hours ago
                Having multiple genuinely different viewpoints in a discussion isn’t evidence of “bots”, it’s the default in any community that isn’t heavily censored to silence dissent. And individuals voicing their different viewpoints isn’t “propaganda”, it’s the definition of discourse.
        • asanineassasin 2 hours ago
          The russian bots are better.. usually its conspiracy fog, attached to a valid russia opposing point that reveals them. Chinese bots are just this months CCP talking points, so can be quite easily visible if they cram some topic only china cares about into every reply.
        • MomsAVoxell 2 hours ago
          Nobody wants honesty, everyone just wants to fit in with the collective. The downvotes are the collective, reactive mindset, showing itself.
        • gilrain 2 hours ago
          The downvotes are because you're resisting easily-observed reality with the seemingly-rational response "Where is this 'air'? If I'm breathing it, it should be easy to point to, no?"

          No. If you can't see it, and don't understand it's there, you cannot be explained to. You're someone with no palate asking how anyone else can know if a wine tastes good.

          • CoastalCoder 2 hours ago
            I appreciate that response. I don't know if/how to convince you that I'm asking the question in good faith, but (FWIW) I am.

            Regardless, wouldn't it be easy to point me to even one example if it's as prevalent as (I think) you're saying?

            Or am I missing your main point, i.e. that what's being described can't be demonstrated via example?

            • gilrain 2 hours ago
              > wouldn't it be easy to point me to even one example

              Read and think about my wine analogy, if you care.

              • CoastalCoder 2 hours ago
                I think you're saying that it's hard to articulate why some particular comment should be judged as having come from a bot. I.e., similar to the SCOTUS opinion regarding pornography: "I know it if I see it".

                Is that correct?

                If so, wouldn't that still admit someone providing a specific example? The whole point of my original comment was that I knew I wasn't judging these things the same as others were.

          • MomsAVoxell 2 hours ago
            Nonsense. They’re trying to breathe and the downvotes won’t allow it.
            • gilrain 2 hours ago
              Point out any wine that doesn't taste the same as any other, to me who has said he cannot taste wine.

              Only then, I'll believe you that wine can taste good or bad.

              Is my mind open? Is this not a waste of your time?

    • wiseowise 1 hour ago
      All bot lives matter! Bots have no ethnicity! Bot Russophobia! Hypocritical West attacks Russian bots only, what about US/European bots!
  • throwaw12 2 hours ago
    Someone needs to learn how to read the Bot Traffic page.

    That is a drop in traffic specifically from Yandex bots (which includes their crawlers and other apps hosted in their DC)

    Now compare it with Bot Traffic in:

    * Russia: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d

    * Europe: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/europe?dateRange=7d

    * Worldwide: https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots?dateRange=7d

    Dip is barely noticeable even in Russia.

    Its like saying, "API requests are completely down" (and small disclaimer: only from your server, because your server is down)

    • walrus01 1 hour ago
      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.
  • timr 2 hours ago
    Isn't this showing the percentage of bot traffic from the Yandex IP range?

    If so, it isn't particularly surprising that the line would go down.

    EDIT: yes, it is. Looking at the same graph for all of Russia, and there's no discernible pattern:

    https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=7d

    same for the 48h view:

    https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/ru?dateRange=2d

    • onemanstartup 2 hours ago
      USA accounts for 44% bot traffic worldwide. Russia 0.9%. Russia derangement syndrome on HN as usual.
      • CaptWorld 34 minutes ago
        The only valid derangement syndrome is Russian derangement syndrome and I'm proud to have it
      • cowlevel 1 hour ago
        This is true. Almost all of my website's bot traffic is from USA.
      • 876433790 37 minutes ago
        [dead]
  • schleck8 3 hours ago
    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

    https://status.yandex.cloud/ru/dashboard

    > ru Compute Cloud, ru Kubernetes, ru PostgreSQL, ru ClickHouse, ru MySQL, ru YDB, ru Kafka, ru Application Load Balancer

    Interestingly, Yandex tells its users on the status page to switch to competitors Selectel, K2Cloud, and VK Cloud. Which will probably be hit next

    • Bluestein 3 hours ago
      This will be a case study in catastrophic events for HA and Ops folks.-
      • walrus01 2 hours ago
        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.

        • ivan_gammel 2 hours ago
          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.

          • walrus01 1 hour ago
            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.
            • ivan_gammel 1 hour ago
              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.

              • walrus01 1 hour ago
                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....

                • ivan_gammel 1 hour ago
                  Well, what an interesting time we are living in…
            • expedition32 5 minutes ago
              In a scenario were data centres in China, the US or France are getting blown up you're in WW3 and your food delivery service no longer matters.
        • themgt 1 hour ago
          The DR plan for pros, "I could go buy colo tomorrow by contacting the right people"
          • walrus01 1 hour ago
            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.
          • SOLAR_FIELDS 1 hour ago
            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.
      • cowlevel 1 hour ago
        I think the complete destruction of the AWS Bahrain region got there first.
      • AlienRobot 2 hours ago
        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.

        • jacquesm 2 hours ago
          > 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.

          You could choose not to invade other countries.

          • loeg 2 hours ago
            This (as with defense) is kind of outside Google or Yandex's purview.
            • phatfish 1 hour ago
              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.
              • ivan_gammel 42 minutes ago
                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.
            • jacquesm 1 hour ago
              Said every company serving fascists ever.

              No, you can choose to collaborate or you can shut it down.

              Collaborators don't get to point back in time and say 'oh we had no choice', even if the choice was a painful one. Sorry it does not work that way.

              • kgeist 8 minutes ago
                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 (your own or wherever you try to emigrate to). "Just shut it down, bro" risks destroying your livelihood and leaving your family financially stranded. 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.

          • AlienRobot 2 hours ago
            I guess, but that doesn't sound like something in the control of a single individual company.
            • jacquesm 1 hour ago
              They control their own individual contribution.
          • whatdouthink 2 hours ago
            But apparently this does not apply to you.
            • jacquesm 1 hour ago
              At least one russian shill that isn't affected by the Yandex strikes. Let's see how the rest of them fares, HN has its fair share of these characters.
              • microtonal 1 minute ago
                The pattern is quite interesting. I think I have seen this account in another thread today. They post pro-Russia comments, get downvoted and then delete their comment again.
        • simondotau 2 hours ago
          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.
          • ivan_gammel 1 hour ago
            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.
            • simondotau 1 hour ago
              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.
      • Hamuko 2 hours ago
        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.
    • alephnerd 1 hour ago
      > The entire compute core is offline, and even worse, Cloud Backup

      Their Kazakh regions are available according to the dashboard, so it isn't as catastrophic.

      Their managed DBs and data processing services are heavily affected though with no Kazakh redundancies from the looks of it.

    • bamboozled 2 hours ago
      I just searched "blyat" and it worked, so?
      • eptcyka 2 hours ago
        Given that blyad is just punctuation at this point, I am not surprised.
        • throw-the-towel 2 hours ago
          The username checks out!

          ("Ept" and "suka" are two other swearwords, that are also used much like punctuation.)

        • walrus01 2 hours ago
          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"
  • f311a 2 hours ago
    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.

    Did people actually stop thinking?

    • monday_ 2 hours ago
      You are replying to a war propaganda post with a heavily editorialized title. Of course it's swimming in bad faith engagement, that's how these things work.
      • walrus01 1 hour ago
        I'd expect nothing less than a comment such as this, from an account that hasn't posted even once for the last 7 months and has in its post history a claim of being located in Moscow. But hey, thanks for showing up to remind us of how terrible the imperialist war-mongering west is. Very refreshing.
        • orbital-decay 55 minutes ago
          Both comments, his and especially yours, are terrible interpretations. That's how any discussion is turned into a mud flinging party.
        • mattstir 1 hour ago
          Not to get sidetracked, and not to argue against anything you've said, but how do you figure that out? For people you disagree with, do you open their profile's comments and start keyword-searching "russia" "china" "moscow" etc in hopes of finding a hit? They mentioned that city once in Jan 2024, halfway down the page and in passing. I'm just curious about how others use this site.
          • walrus01 1 hour ago
            Different people read at different speeds, it took me about 5 seconds when skimming it. If you engage in enough discussion related to Russia online you will quickly learn to identify when inauthentic commenters suddenly show up from a previously idle account to add their 2 cents.

            The person in question doesn't exhibit much of it, but one will also learn when skimming to identify certain grammar and sentence structure characteristics that can point to what is the first language of a person, even if they're writing in fluent English.

            • kakacik 1 hour ago
              All that expertise (which requires some proper experience in the topic) even before you plug a llm to it, even few years ago they were good enough to identify unique writing styles of people across different accounts on HN.

              Anonymity is gone from internet for some time.

              • walrus01 48 minutes ago
                I have seen document-analysis guides with info on how to identify the regional location of anonymous Internet commenters specifically within the US 48 states if you have a sufficiently large corpus of their text, as it relates to how they use certain regional slang, metaphors, colloquialisms, and words to describe things. Think of it as similar to how linguists have made maps showing regional variations in whether people call it "soda" or "coke" or "pop", but extended to all other common forms of North American dialect.

                https://www.businessinsider.com/soda-vs-pop-map-2012-7

    • walrus01 2 hours ago
      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.

      https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1751

      The other one is this: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/20950

      And the 200350 also shows a near complete drop off in bot activity:

      https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots/as200350?dateRange=7d

      • magic_quotes 1 hour ago
        > command/control systems

        There is Hetzner for that.

    • treyd 43 minutes ago
      The bots might be run in the datacenter and proxied through residential IPs as the exit point.
      • Sayrus 21 minutes ago
        If they are, then that wouldn't be YANDEX AS13238. So the linked graph wouldn't show these changes.
      • f311a 29 minutes ago
        You won't see this kind of stats on the CF page.

        All it shows is direct traffic against CF infrastructure.

    • braiamp 1 hour ago
      The funny thing is that apparently I'm the only one that flagged it... I don't know why people comment instead of using the tools?
  • r721 4 hours ago
    *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.

    https://developers.cloudflare.com/radar/glossary/#bot-vs-hum...

    https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot-score/

    • walrus01 4 hours ago
      Correct, I probably didn't didn't write that in the clearest possible way, I meant "detected bot traffic hitting cloudflare originating from Yandex".
  • pluc 3 hours ago
    That's some intense mitigation from Cloudflare
    • Alifatisk 2 hours ago
      You gave me a good laugh, cheers!
  • LiamPowell 2 hours ago
    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?
    • walrus01 1 hour ago
      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.

      https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic/as12876

  • karol 1 hour ago
    Yandex is reporting an outage for some services. https://dzen.ru/news/story/75e4b917-952d-5304-a9b4-70e5dc1fb...
  • ericpauley 2 hours ago
    Interestingly most traffic coming out of this AS was actually UDP: https://dashboard.terracenetworks.com/sources/asns/13238

    Pretty benign AS as far as actual exploit or malicious crawling is concerned.

    • cowlevel 2 hours ago
      Probably QUIC if true, but you should also ask how these people get their data, because this isn't something you can just see or look up.
  • bhouston 2 hours ago
    The US is still responsible for almost 50% of traffic of which the top are Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Cloudlare.

    https://radar.cloudflare.com/bots

    • rpozarickij 1 hour ago
      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).

  • tkrl-pskl 1 hour ago
    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:

    https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

    It would not be a surprise if similar deals have been reached with Yandex.

    But this is a nice demonstration by Ukraine that all our internet problems are caused by large data centers, wherever they may be located.

  • speckx 2 hours ago
    I have to wonder what will happen when the remaining 6 data centers get hit as well. It's bound to happen.
    • qingcharles 6 minutes ago
      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?

    • afdbcreid 2 hours ago
      If there will be an world-wide war, sure. But at that point, the Internet as we know it will probably collapse anyway.
      • cowlevel 2 hours ago
        There is one, but it's taking place mostly by information means, not physical.
    • walrus01 2 hours ago
    • Hamuko 2 hours ago
      Are there even six remaining?
  • beaker52 2 hours ago
    It’s not really surprising that bot traffic originating from a network went away when _all_ traffic originating from that network stopped.
  • pKropotkin 2 hours ago
    Could be just crawlers
  • accountrequired 2 hours ago
    When Brazil and Afrinet? :P
  • modzu 50 minutes ago
    propaganda
  • fHr 1 hour ago
    surprisedpikatchu.jpeg
  • salvuccio 2 hours ago
    Low-IQ Americans will think these bots are X accounts posting memes against Democrats, which is why the media is astroturfing this news to target American liberals. In reality, most of these bots are just scripts performing normal enterprise jobs, but most people know nothing about how the world works.
  • dzink 1 hour ago
    Now check how many open models search Yandex when asked for something.
  • bamboozled 2 hours ago
    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.
    • cowlevel 2 hours ago
      It's only counting Yandex search crawler traffic, not any actually bad bots.
  • WiSaGaN 4 hours ago
    isn't this only counting russian origin already?
    • walrus01 4 hours ago
      The URL is CF's public metrics for bot traffic from a single specific Russian ASN, Yandex.

      https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1751

      • cowlevel 3 hours ago
        oh well of course if you blow up Yandex then Yandex stops sending you traffic, because they got blown up.
        • walrus01 2 hours ago
          And nothing of value was lost.
          • cowlevel 2 hours ago
            Yandex is the best search engine that doesn't follow American censorship norms. For this reason Kagi uses them as one source of several.
  • surfingdino 2 hours ago
    So, is sending hot hate towards a bot farm going to be a paid service on Cloudflare now?
  • toomuchtodo 4 hours ago
    Cloudflare should consider donating to the Ukrainian military for the public service they are performing.
    • exe34 3 hours ago
      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!
  • dintech 2 hours ago
    Oh no, how is Trump going to win the midterms now?
  • rvz 4 hours ago
    “AI agents” is just a fancy rebranding of “bots” with some “intelligence”.
  • andrepd 2 hours ago
    Now do OpenAI's dc...
  • TacticalCoder 2 hours ago
    [flagged]
    • thenthenthen 2 hours ago
      Thanks! So thats why I cant reach my bank, health insurance, municipality, tax office and government services from where I live, super!
    • walrus01 2 hours ago
      Modern day Russia is about the furthest possible thing from "commies". Kleptocracy? Fascism? Dictatorship? Oligarchy? Sure, some bizarro world combination of all of those. But if you want people to take your opinion seriously, try not to sound like somebody's demented grandpa by tossing around "commie" like it's 1959.

      I am pretty damn sure that whatever Putin is doing these days is in no way motivated by an adherence to the Marxist-Leninist way of life.

      • nephihaha 2 hours ago
        According to orthodox Marxism, the Russian empire had not fully industrialised or created a widespread bourgeoisie. It was still largely feudal and rural, and a monarchy. Some Marxists have tried to say retroactively that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois not a proletarian revolution as a result.

        Lenin tried to paint kulaks as bourgeois en lieu of actual target, and had to modify Marxism heavily to make things fit. Stalin certainly managed to industrialise much of the USSR, so fulfilled that end. Yeltsin-Putin Russia has created an actual bourgeois state, maybe allowing a workers' revolution to take place for real next time.

        Or sort of. In reality, Marx was not an infallible prophet. He did not anticipate artificial intelligence or its consequences, genetic engineering, broadcast media or a host of other things. History has not followed all of the paths he suggested.

  • bearjaws 2 hours ago
    Someone needs to inventory all the accounts that go dark on social media so we can flag them going forward.
  • k__ 1 hour ago
    Yeah, I noticed the overtone window sliding back from the right.
  • blingo2665 2 hours ago
    An eye for an eye for the Russians. I love western imperial propaganda though, and how HN so eagerly amplifies it. There’s something self-fulfilling about willingly becoming a foot soldier of the Empire.

    Here's to a world where the West is monolithic, and may Iran, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine be only be the beginning. And may every new crusade for freedom and democracy leave behind another Gaza, in pursuit of upholding human rights and civilizing the world.

    • phatfish 37 minutes ago
      The deranged Orange Idiot and the bloodthirsty War Criminal are the ones carrying out what you describe. The rest of "the West" wants nothing more to do with them, and is currently attempting to avoid all the knives heading for their backs.

      Monolithic indeed.

    • wiseowise 1 hour ago
      Evil, imperialistic, warmongering West that checks notes condemns Israel’s actions, and generally condemned attack on Iran.