Chinese AI Company Set Back By DeepSeek Cyber Attack

By Scott Ikeda for CPO Magazine
Tuesday, February 4, 2025

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DeepSeek’s meteoric rise to the top of the AI assistant charts has been slowed somewhat by a large-scale cyber attack, which temporarily halted new registrations. As of February 1, the Chinese AI company’s status update page indicates that the issue has been identified and that a fix is being implemented.

As to who might organize a DDoS cyber attack against DeepSeek, Dr. Ilia Kolochenko (CEO at ImmuniWeb, attorney-at-law and a Vice-Chair at the ABA’s Information Security Committee) believes rival companies can be ruled out: “Talking about nation-state-sponsored cyber-attacks, it is somewhat challenging to imagine geopolitical rivals of China deploying such strategically primitive techniques, which will highly unlikely have any long-term impact on DeepSeek, instead creating free publicity for it. Involvement of hacktivists is remotely possible, but we cannot clearly see here any usual motives of hacktivist groups – such as politics or military conflicts – behind attacking DeepSeek. A formal investigation report by DeepSeek will likely bring clarity about the incident. Most importantly, this incident indicates that while many corporations and investors are obsessed with the ballooning AI hype, we still fail to address foundational cybersecurity issues despite having access to allegedly super-powerful GenAI technologies. An overall disappointment in GenAI technologies is possible in 2025.”

DeepSeek also experienced an exposure of sensitive data, though this appeared to be from a misconfigured public-facing database rather than a cyber attack. That trove of data contained digital software keys and chat logs containing what appear to be user conversations. A cybersecurity firm hit upon it through scanning and reported it to the Chinese AI company, but said that it was so easy to find that it was likely others had also come across it. Read Full Article