Cloudflare found no evidence that Russian influence operations stopped — The National

Cloudflare said that after Ukrainian strikes on Yandex data centres located in the aggressor state of Russia, it found no evidence that operations manipulating social media or other malicious online activity had ceased. According to its data, search engine crawling stopped, but malicious bots moved to other networks, The National reports.

Traffic decline does not mean trolls stopped

The discussion emerged after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy stated that attacks on Yandex infrastructure had led to a decline in the activity of pro-Russian bots. A screenshot containing Cloudflare data was circulated on social media as purported evidence that “troll factories” had been shut down due to a sharp drop in bot traffic.

Olga Belogolova, director of the emerging technologies initiative at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, said that such conclusions conflate different technological concepts. She stressed that bots are not the same as trolls, and that Cloudflare classifies as bots any automated scripts that operate outside a browser.

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Automated requests and information operations

According to Belogolova’s explanation, shutting down a data centre stops the automated crawling and indexing of web resources. Cloudflare Radar also clarified that bot traffic in its data means automated requests to websites on the Cloudflare network, including from crawlers and scripts, rather than necessarily activity on social platforms.

Belogolova, who previously oversaw policy on countering influence operations at Meta, added that the infrastructure of such operations and troll networks is usually not hosted on Yandex. At the same time, she noted that strikes on Russian technological infrastructure may disrupt the digital economy and cloud services, but are not a precise tool for countering foreign information operations.