Over the space of four days recently, Ukrainian drones successfully targeted three large data centres in Russia. The Yandex data centre in Sasovo, more than 1,000km from Kyiv, was struck and shut down. Second and third strikes hit data centres in Kaluga, partially disabling operations, and Vladimir, taking the facility fully offline.
Yandex is Russia’s version of Google, providing search, cloud and maps, as well as the plumbing for retail banking. Russian Railways, the state-owned railway company, and MegaFon, a large telecommunications and mobile operator, went dark following the strikes. Yandex has three supercomputers that it uses to train its AI models, and two of those were inside the first building to be hit – and are assumed to be destroyed. Ripple effects from the operation were felt in web traffic anomalies all over the world. Cloudflare, which monitors internet traffic, saw automated traffic from Yandex’s network fall by 35 per cent when Sasovo was hit, going down to 99 per cent after Vladimir was taken out.
Why should we care about a data centre nearly 4,000km from Dublin? What might a sudden drop in Russian web traffic mean for Ireland?
A lot of people think it matters quite a bit, as it turns out. An intriguing theory suggesting that vast armies of Russian bots had suddenly gone silent immediately went viral on the internet. The sudden change in web activity across Europe and the United States sent the internet down into one of its favourite rabbit holes: wondering how much of our furious online discourses we thought we’ve been having with each other has actually been with Russian bots. Here in Ireland, it manifested as a conspiracy theory that one controversial Twitter account, Éire89376, was actually a man called Dmitry using Yandex translate this whole time. A post shared on Reddit, and later removed, made statistical claims showing a huge drop in activity on European political forums, including that the Irish politics subreddit, r/irishpolitics, was 80 per cent quieter than usual.
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And while this seems like not much more than a somewhat entertaining diversion, the fact that so many people found the theory entirely plausible is worth paying attention to.
In fact, there’s no statistical proof that what Cloudflare saw was a drop specifically in Russian bot traffic, but that is almost beside the point – in politics, perception is reality. And whatever the reality, the perception in Europe was clear: Zelenskiy said social media had become noticeably less hostile; while in Germany, claims of a sharp fall in online activity around the far-right AfD party spread widely.
This means two things for Ireland. The first is that, despite having no natural enemies, Ireland does have security vulnerabilities – and Russia is a security threat. We have spent a lot of time worrying about Russian submarines and ships in Irish waters, and what they might be doing to our undersea cables and critical infrastructure. Yet somehow, we overlooked the possibility of a just as grave threat to our information sphere. Comparatively little attention has been given to the possibility that we are reading, sharing and arguing with the digital equivalent of those same hostile actors every day. The submarines may be somewhere out in the Atlantic’s vast drawl. But the bots, if that’s what they are, are already with us.
In 2018 I was part of a monitoring programme out of George Mason University in Virginia on Russian influence operations on social media in the US midterm elections and the Missouri Senate race. We briefed the US state department and eight federal agencies on what we found – that the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was identifying the issues that divided a state’s voters and flooding social media on exactly that issue every time a race narrowed to within a few points. This was later given as evidence to the Mueller investigation, the US department of justice inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and to the House intelligence committee.
What I learned then is that what might seem like a standard grumpy comments section to you or me can quickly become Russia’s theatre of military operations.
Ireland does not have a secure information environment. We have an independent media struggling for resources and limited independent investigative journalism.
Meanwhile, look at the people surrounding our political leaders. Of the 10 advisers working for Simon Harris, at least three had direct backgrounds in journalism, while several others are from government communications, public relations and digital media. Many of our politicians have prioritised getting better at managing messages than supporting the independent institutions needed to scrutinise them.
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The result is that Ireland sometimes looks like a country governed by Liveline phone-ins, Twitter pile-ons and Reddit threads – and the political priority is to respond to whatever, or whoever, has captured public attention today. Given that public reaction has become a substitute for any sort of analysis, think about how easy it is to influence policies with an artificially amplified controversy and a co-ordinated influence operation.
Ireland is just as susceptible as any other European country to manipulation by outside forces.
And if we accept that Ireland’s superpower is diplomacy – which is often given as a reason for not needing military capacity – then we must accept the consequence: those relationships are exactly the same channels a hostile state might exploit. You do not need to attack a neutral country’s non-existent tanks if you can target its conversations and its trust in its own institutions.
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With Mark Zuckerberg moving to Ireland, perhaps now is a good time to remember that we need to treat information security as national security. Ireland needs to invest further in independent investigative journalism and to build the expertise to monitor and expose co-ordinated influence operations – to highlight manufactured outrage before it gets turned into our public policy.
