Netanyahu said that after Ukraineʼs attacks on “Yandex” data centers, anti-Israel bots have significantly decreased. Analysts previously said otherwise

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that after the Ukrainian attacks on “Yandex” data centers in Russia, the activity of Internet bots with anti-Israeli posts has significantly decreased.

He said this during the presentation of Israelʼs new security doctrine on October 18.

"I donʼt know if you saw what happened in Russia with ʼYandexʼ. 60% of the online activity of Russian users directed against us has disappeared. This speaks to the power that is here," Netanyahu said.

He noted that this example demonstrates the large scale of possibilities. According to Netanyahu, Israel should also “act in this direction”, and appropriate steps are already being taken.

At the same time, analysts who previously examined the consequences of the attacks on “Yandex” found no evidence of a sharp drop in the activity of propaganda bots, writes the Israeli publication Globes.

In particular, the founder and CEO of the Israeli company CHEQ (which deals with cybersecurity in the field of marketing and protection against bots,) Guy Titunovich stated that there are no noticeable changes in their data.

“I can’t completely rule out this version, but we don’t see any changes in our data, even though we track millions of sites and billions of interactions every day,” says Titunovich.

According to him, “Cloudflare” statistics show that after the attacks, automated traffic from “Yandex” networks did indeed drop, but a significant part of it was for regular search operations, while the overall activity of bots did not change significantly.

Titunovich also noted that it is technically unlikely that complex information operations would operate en masse directly through the servers of a large Russian company, which are easy to identify and block. Typically, this is done using home IP addresses and proxy servers in other countries.

The “Fake Reporter” project came to similar conclusions. Its analysts tested claims of a sharp drop in posts with the words “Free Palestine” and “Genocide” on social media X, but found no significant reduction in activity. They also noted that graphs circulating on social media purporting to show a sharp decrease in bot activity could be misleading.

• Ukrainian forces attacked at least three of the “Yandex” largest data centers in Ryazan region, Kaluga, and Vladimir in October, shutting down all of them.
• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called it a “inversed response” to Russian attacks on Ukraine’s digital infrastructure.

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