Malicious Russian disinformation bot traffic barely flinches after Ukraine strikes Yandex data centers and auto-migration kicks in

Russian bot traffic showed signs of slowing down after Ukraine bombed some of Yandex’s biggest data centers. Unfortunately, while the attacks have slowed down overall bot traffic from Russia, Cloudflare reports that malicious bots appeared to have simply transferred to other hosting ASNs like Radist and Selectel. Overall traffic on Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud continues to stay at 10% to 15% of normal traffic levels, meaning the network remains disrupted. Cloudflare noted that traffic from the former is composed mostly of verified search crawlers indexing websites, meaning traffic from this service is mostly legitimate. On the other hand, the latter experienced a drop in malicious activities such as vulnerability scanning and probing after the data center bombings, but Cloudflare says that “high-volume automation did not vanish — it simply migrated to other hosting providers.”

This was evident with one Cloudflare customer in the gambling sector: it saw malicious bot requests from Yandex.Cloud drop to zero but started seeing the same …