Cloudflare: after the outage of Yandex networks, bots' share of global traffic did not change, and some automated requests moved to other providers
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
A drop in traffic from Yandex networks does not mean a drop in the total number of bots: part of the requests came from other providers.
Cloudflare published an analysis of two Yandex networks: the search one (AS13238) and the cloud one (AS200350). According to its data, after drone strikes on three Yandex facilities on October 7-11 (reported earlier), traffic on October 11 fell 99% in the search network and 90% in the cloud network; on October 14 at 18:00 UTC it was about 85% of normal. The drop in the search network, per Cloudflare, consisted almost entirely of verified search crawlers. In the cloud network automated requests fell by about 40%, probing of WordPress plugins by 90%, and requests identified as scanners by 93%, but high-volume automation, in Cloudflare's conclusion, did not disappear and moved to other hosting providers; bots' share of global HTTP traffic stayed at about 39%. Cloudflare sees no link between the Yandex outage and a global change in malicious traffic and notes that the source of traffic does not establish who is responsible. Cloudflare adds that it is talking about automated requests to websites, not necessarily bots on social networks.
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