175 pointsby walrus012 hours ago20 comments
  • londons_explorean hour 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%.

    • cromka40 minutes 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.

    • asdfsa3218 minutes ago
      Don't let logic get in the way of a good propaganda.
      • lukan2 minutes 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)

      • caaqila few seconds ago
        It's nice reminder that HN is just filled with the same primitive tribal normies and is always getting oneshotted by the same transparent xenephobic hysteria that plagues the rest of the internet.
    • DonHopkins18 minutes ago
      Ukraine should take the rest of Yandex permanently offline so Cloudflare can get a clean objective measurment, and we can enjoy fewer Russian shill-bots on Hacker News.
      • CoastalCoder10 minutes 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.

        • BlackRabbit19 minutes ago
          Post a controversial political statement and grab a beer.
          • braiamp3 minutes ago
            Ehh, there are enough humans that would do that. Don't delude yourself thinking that there are no people that hold such views.
        • asanineassasin6 minutes 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.
    • dgellow23 minutes 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.
    • AlienRobot26 minutes 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.
  • throwaw126 minutes 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)

  • timr15 minutes 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

    • onemanstartup9 minutes ago
      USA accounts for 44% bot traffic worldwide. Russia 0.9%. Russia derangement syndrome on HN as usual.
  • LiamPowell3 minutes 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?
  • r7212 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/

    • walrus012 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".
  • schleck843 minutes 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].

    • Bluestein34 minutes ago
      This will be a case study in catastrophic events for HA and Ops folks.-
      • Hamuko3 minutes 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.
      • 25 minutes ago
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      • AlienRobot18 minutes 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.

        • simondotaua minute 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.
    • bamboozled25 minutes ago
      I just searched "blyat" and it worked, so?
      • eptcyka19 minutes ago
        Given that blyad is just punctuation at this point, I am not surprised.
        • walrus014 minutes 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"
        • throw-the-towel8 minutes ago
          The username checks out!

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

  • f311a2 minutes 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 bots from data center IPs that people mention here.

    Did people actually stop thinking?

    • walrus01a minute 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.
  • pluc34 minutes ago
    That's some intense mitigation from Cloudflare
    • Alifatisk25 minutes ago
      You gave me a good laugh, cheers!
  • ericpauley17 minutes 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.

    • cowlevel11 minutes 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.
  • bearjaws16 minutes ago
    Someone needs to inventory all the accounts that go dark on social media so we can flag them going forward.
  • speckx24 minutes ago
    I have to wonder what will happen when the remaining 6 data centers get hit as well. It's bound to happen.
    • Hamuko2 minutes ago
      Are there even six remaining?
    • afdbcreid14 minutes ago
      If there will be an world-wide war, sure. But at that point, the Internet as we know it will probably collapse anyway.
      • cowlevel10 minutes ago
        There is one, but it's taking place mostly by information means, not physical.
  • 35 minutes ago
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  • pKropotkin9 minutes ago
    Could be just crawlers
  • dintech20 minutes ago
    Oh no, how is Trump going to win the midterms now?
  • toomuchtodo2 hours ago
    Cloudflare should consider donating to the Ukrainian military for the public service they are performing.
    • exe3428 minutes 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!
  • bamboozled26 minutes 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.
    • cowlevel10 minutes ago
      It's only counting Yandex search crawler traffic, not any actually bad bots.
  • WiSaGaN2 hours ago
    isn't this only counting russian origin already?
    • walrus01an hour ago
      The URL is CF's public metrics for bot traffic from a single specific Russian ASN, Yandex.

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

      • cowlevel40 minutes ago
        oh well of course if you blow up Yandex then Yandex stops sending you traffic, because they got blown up.
        • walrus016 minutes ago
          And nothing of value was lost.
  • surfingdino20 minutes ago
    So, is sending hot hate towards a bot farm going to be a paid service on Cloudflare now?
  • 2 hours ago
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  • rvz2 hours ago
    “AI agents” is just a fancy rebranding of “bots” with some “intelligence”.