GoKawiilCloudflare data shows malicious bots shifted hosts after Yandex data center strikes
Following reported Ukrainian drone strikes on Yandex facilities between October 7-11, traffic on Yandex's two autonomous systems collapsed by up to 99%. Cloudflare's analysis found the drop on Yandex Search mostly reflected legitimate search crawlers going offline, while on Yandex.Cloud, malicious automated traffic such as vulnerability scanning largely relocated to other hosting providers rather than disappearing.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The findings suggest that aggregate traffic charts can overstate the impact of infrastructure attacks on malicious actors, since bad actors can simply migrate to alternative hosts. This implies that physical strikes on data centers may disrupt legitimate services more durably than the bot networks or influence operations they were assumed to target.
- Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud traffic dropped 90-99% after reported strikes on data centers.
- Most of the Search traffic loss came from legitimate crawlers, not malicious bots.
- Malicious automation on Yandex.Cloud largely moved to other providers instead of stopping.
Source: blog.cloudflare.com, 2026-10-14
Published there as: “Yandex outage: data shows that instead of going dark, malicious bots moved”
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