Akamai

Russia Starts Blocking Encrypted DNS Protocols DoH and DoT Across Major ISPs

Since mid-August 2026, subscribers of Rostelecom, Dom.ru, Tattelecom, SkyNet and Beeline have reported sudden failures of encrypted DNS services from Google and Cloudflare. The blocking affects both DoT on port 853 and DoH on port 443, but the mechanisms differ: DoT connections receive TCP RST packets while DoH sessions are silently dropped after the TLS ClientHello. Analysis shows the interference originates from TSPU equipment performing DPI on SNI fields and known resolver domains. At the same time, ordinary UDP DNS queries are being intercepted and answered by the NSIDI infrastructure, returning NXDOMAIN for blocked domains. The changes indicate a centrally coordinated rollout of new filtering rules rather than isolated operator actions. Users are advised that encrypted DNS no longer provides reliable privacy or circumvention and that full VPN tunnels remain the only robust option.

Bot Traffic Overtakes Human Traffic in 2024 as AI Agents and Scrapers Surge

Analysis of internet traffic from 2013 to 2026 shows automated bots steadily eroding human dominance online. Imperva data reveals human traffic fell to 47 percent by 2025 while malicious bots reached 40 percent. Good bots such as search crawlers remain stable, but gray AI agents and scrapers now drive much of the growth. Companies face rising infrastructure costs from bot traffic that generates no revenue, described as an invisible tax. Cloudflare and Akamai reports confirm high volumes of automated requests, with many classified as harmful scraping. The trend raises concerns about a synthetic internet shaped more by AI recommendations than human activity.

Bots Now Form Over Half of Global Internet Traffic in 2025, Driving API Attacks and Business Metric Distortion

Automated clients generated more than 50% of analyzed internet traffic in 2025, with malicious bots responsible for 40% of the total volume. AI-enabled automation attacks increased 12.5 times year-over-year, while daily API attacks rose 113% according to Akamai data. Simple scripts still dominate volume at 59% of bot traffic, yet sophisticated botnets exceeding 4.5 million devices now distribute activity across residential proxies and compromised endpoints. Credential stuffing, scraping, and transaction abuse continue to target business logic rather than software vulnerabilities, distorting analytics, inflating infrastructure costs, and degrading user experience. Cloudflare reports that 20% of verified bot traffic now comes from AI crawlers, blurring lines between beneficial and harmful automation. Organizations must classify bots by intent, delegation, and business impact instead of relying on IP reputation or single signals such as User-Agent strings.