why are these are being set up in Ukraine and not Russia? What do they gain from having them within reach of the Ukrainian police?
My guess is that it’d make it look like it were actual ukrainians spreading the disinfo, as the IP wouldn’t show russian addresses. Could also be that Ukraine is blocking internet traffic from Russia, so being there is a way to bypass the block.
I fully expect the assholes behind said farms to be safely within russian territory, so they’re just sighing and shrugging as having to set up a new base.
Still, being physically there is weird. Aren’t there reliable ways to fake it?
Depends what you mean by “faking”. You can fake Ukrainian IP by using some VPN service, but then you’re using VPN IP which is quite obvious. If you want many genuinely residential IPs, you could use some botnet and infected computers in Ukraine. This is more authentic and harder to filter out. But some services actually require phone number and at least capability to receive texts to verify the number, some use the number as user account. (Telegram and such) Then you need actual SIM cards (not to be confused with Sims 3, the game 😉) and you need to connect to local cell tower. (perhaps you could do roaming, but that would be quite obvious long term) Now to fake all that, you’d need at least some devices operated in Ukraine and at that stage it’s probably easier to find some people willing to do this locally for money or because they are high on russian propaganda themselves.
Couldn’t they set up a VPN / Proxy in Ukraine and have the actual bot farm run from within Russia.
If they did that it would be pretty easy to spot for anyone looking, all the bot accounts would be connecting through the same IP address(es). For it to be believable, you would need thousands of Ukrainian IP addresses, owned by Ukrainian internet providers. What Russia did is an effective way to achieve this. With thousands of sim cards on multiple Ukrainian mobile networks, the traffic is very hard to distinguish from real Ukrainian internet traffic. Of course the downside is that all the devices with those sim cards have to be in Ukraine for it to work. It’s also possible that at least some of these devices were essentially just acting as VPNs for more devices in Russia.
