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Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it
(www.motherjones.com)
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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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This story, that Cloudflare reported lower identified automated bot and API traffic from the ASN of the destroyed data centres, has been so massively warped it’s insane.
It demonstrates that average people and apparently tech reporters like toms hardware don’t know how the internet works at all.
When residential proxies affect at least a third of US households, you don’t need to route through a data centre that will be flagged as bot traffic. You set up a wire guard config and route to a residential proxy installed on millions of smart TVs, android boxes, smart appliances, desktop computers, and phones.
Seriously, I recently mapped multiple residential proxy networks with over 30 million unique US ips that were just scraping. You can use math to reliably fingerprint these networks, they’re big, with hundreds of millions of IPs involved, and you can rotate them via an API call to clean ones.
Zero of this traffic would be taken down by these strikes. We didn’t even see any perceptible change in internet traffic overall with this.
I'm sure they just don't care. The vast amount of modern "journalism" is just reposting someone else's story. And if they get clicks, they don't much particularly care if it's accurate.
Modern journalism, LOL. I've been reading on implementing Forths recently, there's plenty of texts that don't make sense, because how the hell do you change basic dictionary if you don't have a dictionary already? There might be an implementation that doesn't explicitly list that basic dictionary in the order of used ones, but what was literally written was wrong.
Even on things supposedly interesting only for people looking for specifics there's plenty of vague and wrong texts. You start trying to approach the task by following them literally, then realize that's not possible. Again and again. Until you just accept that you'll get there faster if you make things up and do what you want, then add things you've missed along the way.
I’ve blocked my cameras and TV from reaching the wider web.
Is there a tool I can use to monitor my home network for this sort of thing?
Wireshark will give you deep infomation about any network traffic.
Hmm. That seems to be the big gun. And something that will require analysis.
I was hoping for something intended for just this purpose.
I would be looking at what tools opnsense provides. opnsense is a firewall operating system, its most effective to put it between your appliances and the internet. but some if its tools could also be used standalone
A proxy only routes traffic while the cpu cycles are happening elsewhere, allegedly, the data center that went offline.
Your argument only makes sense if those proxies are more than just routing network packets but also hosting the actual code of those bots. Oh, and you'd also need to assume there's no c&c, the bots should be autonomous. Else there's the single point of failure. If there's a c&c then they can all go offline with a strike.
Exactly. Those smart TVs can be used as proxy to get around IP bans, but they can't run LLMs on their own to generate social media posts. They can't coordinate DoS attacks, only play a part in them.