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Want to stop hate propaganda on a global scale? Take out a Russian data center.

KINSELLA: Russian data centres big players in global hate-propaganda war Back to video

That’s what Ukraine did. 

Yandex is Russia’s biggest technology company. It’s often called Russia’s Google. It runs a search engine and offers web browsers, cloud storage, maps and navigation. It’s even involved in online food delivery and Uber-style taxis. It has facilities across Russia, and is very, very pro-Kremlin.

In the past few days, Ukraine struck a Yandex data center containing two supercomputers in Sasovo, Russia, which is about 300 kilometres Southeast of the Kremlin. A second, bigger Yandex campus is found in Kaluga, a couple of hours West of Sasovo. Ukraine hit that, too, and knocked it offline. A third Yandex centre was also hit last week.

The effect was instantaneous. Internet traffic and bots – that is, automated fake “humans” that work much, much faster than humans online – dropped off noticeably. Cloudflare, which tracks these things, found that bot traffic dropped nearly 60% on Oct. 8 – the day Ukraine hit Yandex with FP-1 one-way attack drones. 

NetBlocks, another firm that tracks........

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