Did Ukraine Just Bomb the Russian Bots?

Ukraine’s strikes on Yandex’s data centers disrupted services beyond search: users reportedly lost payment-app balances, and some Moscow residents could not access apartment courtyards. Yandex shares fell about 11%, but a source close to management said restoring full capacity would take several months, while replacement servers could be slower and more expensive to obtain.

Russia’s data-localization law kept citizens’ personal data on servers inside Russia, which Boyle says insulated the Russian internet from Western sanctions but concentrated digital infrastructure within Ukraine’s drone range. Yandex’s example of running nine virtual machines in each of two locations illustrates the costly redundancy Boyle describes as insurance against outages; after the third strike, customers without capacity already arranged could not buy it.

The chart claiming a collapse in online activity around Germany’s AfD drew more than 4 million views despite including future-dated data and using a vertical scale that exaggerated the decline. That viral example sits alongside research finding that false news spread farther and faster than true news on Twitter, with political false stories 70% more likely to be retweeted.

Influence operations and online fraud can draw on extensive networks of compromised or rented devices: the 911S5 botnet allegedly supplied connections used for 560,000 fraudulent unemployment claims, while Google said EPIDA recruited devices through at least 600 Android apps and more than 3,000 Windows programs. A separate Latvian SIM farm held 40,000 active cards whose numbers had been used to open more than 49 million accounts.