Experts say there is no evidence that Russian trolls have been affected by Ukraine’s Yandex attacks.

cross-posted from : https://lemmy.zip/post/73193700

Claims that Ukrainian strikes on Russian data centres reduced Kremlin-linked bot networks have spread widely online, but experts have told BBC Verify there is no evidence the attacks have significantly reduced them.

Researchers from dTeam, a US-based group that tracks Moscow-linked influence operations, told BBC Verify there has not been “any traffic change from known Russian accounts and bot clusters on any platform”.

Bots linked to pro-Kremlin influence operations like Storm-1516 and Matryoshka - both of which BBC Verify has previously reported on - were still active on social media on Tuesday, evidence shared with BBC Verify by dTeam shows.

  • Taldan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    11 hours ago

    I think people would be well served to understand some underlying concepts here

    1. Modern compute operates like a fungible commodity. You can run your workload on almost any data center, and can generally switch with minimal friction

    2. Bot farms and influence campaigns are a high priority for the Russian government

    Given these 2 facts, we can make some inferences from what happened. Even with 3 Yandex data centers struck, we would expect any bot farms operating from Yandex to stay alive, or quickly return depending on how failover is implemented

    We would expect to see the lowest value compute to be pushed out of the commodity market. Things like crawlers, free services, and time insensitive processes

    If bot farms were running in a hit data center, we could expect to see a short drop as they fail over and restart. That’s something inly data analytics at Meta, X, Reddit, etc. Could accurately detect

    BBC was methodologically flawed here. They’re looking only for Yandex activity and IPs. For obvious reasons any bot farms would be egressing through IPs/devices not associated with a data center. Those would not change, just where the computational portion of the bot farm is ran

    We probably won’t know for sure what was affected for a decade or more, but it is very likely Kremlin compute is run at Yandex data centers, the same as how the US government runs a lot of compute on AWS/GCP/Azure

    • NathanRanch@lemmy.zipEnglish
      8·
      11 hours ago

      Finally someone gets it. Seeing misinformation spread because everyone wants to be right is painful.