Deepseek Is Apparently Under Attack
Chinese AI startup Deepseek says it is temporarily limiting registrations due to large-scale malicious attacks on its services. Here’s a look at their status page which can be found at https://status.deepseek.com/:
Erich Kron, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, commented:
“One of the key tenets of cybersecurity is availability. Combined with confidentiality and integrity of data, these make up what is known as the CIA triad. Although most people think of confidentiality and battling data breaches when it comes to cybersecurity, the lack of availability can be just as crippling to an organization if they are not able to provide the services they promise to their customers. With the popularity of DeepSeek growing, it’s not a big surprise that they are being targeted by malicious web traffic. These sorts of attacks could be a way to extort an organization by promising to stop attacks and restore availability for a fee, it could be rival organizations seeking to negatively impact the competition, or it could even be people who have invested in a competing organization and want to protect their investment by taking out the competition.
“The cybersecurity world has become global, with attacks originating from any continent on the planet and targeting any organization with a web presence. Unfortunately many counter moves, such as pausing new user registration to allow computing resources to be freed up for other services, can bring back the use of the platform for some, but also makes for a bad experience for potentially new subscribers and can be very damaging to the organization. In a time where internet outages can impact organizations to the tune of millions of dollars lost per hour, or more, the threat of attacks such as this is very real and should be carefully considered and planned for.”
I find it interesting that Deepseek is under attack given how much “noise” that they’ve made in the last few days. Ignoring the fact that no citizen of a western country should sign up for this service, it will be interesting to see if an how they recover, and how they defend against attacks like this in the future.
January 30, 2025 at 2:58 pm
[…] A few days ago, DeepSeek was setting the world on fire because the AI that it put on the table offered strong LLM performance at a much lower cost to train. That made heads explode. But heads are exploding again with news that cybersecurity researchers from Wiz have found a ClickHouse database owned by Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek containing over a million lines of chat history and sensitive information. The database was publicly accessible and allowed the researchers full control over database operations. That too made heads explode. And this is on top of attacks DeepSeek. […]