Ukraine is now taking the war into the digital world. They are hitting Russian data centers—the big buildings filled with computers that power the internet—to stop Russian bots.

Russian bots are computer programs that act like real people online. They spread lies and fake news to trick people and cause trouble. By attacking the physical places where these programs live, Ukraine hopes to turn the lights out on these propaganda machines.

But this plan has some hitches. Experts from Cloudflare, a company that helps run the internet, say that when these sites go down, the bots don't just disappear. Instead, they move to other servers. It’s like playing a game of whack-a-mole; you hit one, and another one pops up somewhere else.

This also shows a major weakness in how Russia keeps its internet running. Because they rely on these specific centers, hitting them can cause big outages. The New York Times reports that data centers have become a new kind of target in wars across the globe, including Ukraine, Russia, and the Middle East.

President Zelensky believes these strikes are working to silence the digital noise. While it is clear these attacks hurt Russia’s digital network, it is still hard to tell if it will stop the bots for good. For now, the digital war continues as both sides fight for control over the information we see online.

Source: The Bulwark