Russian bot traffic dropped dramatically following Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centers, raising speculation over whether the outages will hurt Moscow’s reported disinformation efforts ahead of the U.S. midterms. Ukrainian drones have hit three sites belonging to Russia’s leading technology company, whose search engine is the country’s closest variant of Google. Cybersecurity company Cloudflare reported that bot traffic from the Yandex network temporarily dropped to less than 1 percent of the maximum number of HTTP requests recorded in the past two weeks.
This has prompted questions over whether the Ukrainian strikes could also paralyze Russian disinformation campaigns. U.S. intelligence agencies are monitoring schemes by Moscow and other adversaries to meddle in the midterm elections on November 3. Technology commentators have rejected the prospect that hitting the Yandex sites could also erode Russia’s election interference.
However, Carlos Perez, director of security intelligence for cybersecurity consultancy TrustedSec, told Newsweek that disruptions to Russian data centers could potentially affect a much wider range of malicious activity directed by Moscow. Newsweek has contacted Yandex for comment and is awaiting a response. Ukraine’s three attacks on Yandex facilities are in retaliation for Moscow’s attacks on data centers inside Ukraine last month that caused significant internet disruption in Kyiv.
On October 8, Yandex’s largest data center in the town of Sasovo, in Russia’s Ryazan region south-east of Moscow, was struck. Yandex said the damage was serious enough that it could not confirm whether damaged equipment could be restored at the site, which contained tens of thousands of servers. The site also contained two of its three supercomputers, Lyapunov and Chervonenkis, which are used to develop and train Yandex’s AI model.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that Russia has been "and still are striking our data centers." referring to attacks in September. He added, "we always respond in kind." The next day, there was a strike on a Yandex site in Kaluga City which knocked several data center modules with video showing the drone approaching the facility southwest of Moscow. After the latest strike on Sunday, operations at the Yandex data center in Vladimir, 125 miles east of Moscow, were closed.
It caused significant internet service disruptions for businesses, consumers, and critical infrastructure in Russia. Replacing damaged equipment will take at least six months and would require foreign channels as much of it is not Russian-made, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported. Getting the centers back to pre-strike capabilities will be expensive and potentially slow to obtain due to the current global shortage of GPUs and memory chips, the newspaper added.
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