Drone strikes didn’t take out a Russian bot farm, but we were primed to believe it

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.