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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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No, I manage the website for a cyber security company.
So when the Ukraine war first started, the executive team asked us to block all traffic from Russia to our site. We logged a similar drop in traffic.
This time around, the traffic also dropped but it looked like it came mostly from the UK, DE, DL and SG. It basically went to zero.
We cross reference those IPs and they were all from a VPN.
So you don't manage a site with any social media component? I don't think the bots that were crawling your site are the same ones people are saying disappeared from sites like twitter.
It's not very surprising that banning all Russian traffic resulted in most of that traffic moving to a VPN; that's the primary method of circumventing geofencing.
Well, I obviously can't confirm if it's related, but the day the strikes happened is the day my traffic dropped. It could be a coincidence. A data center could have both the twitter trolls and malicious traffic.
Yeah I suspect the traffic did drop when Yandex's spiders and all the colocated AI systems stopped crawling your site; data from cloudflare confirms this. It's not a coincidence; it's just not what people are claiming it is. You'd probably see a similar drop if someone bombed data centers in the US, but that doesn't mean they're running social media troll bots. AI bots are responsible for a lot of traffic these days.
Do you have any information on what user agent strings the suspicious traffic was using? Yandex bots might still use their user agent string even if they were crawling through a VPN. AI bots would probably masquerade as a standard browser, but would be likely try to crawl your entire site unlike natural traffic visiting a few pages. With VPNs in play it's too difficult to say for sure, though.