Cyberattack on DeepSeek, including brute-force assault, started in US: Chinese state media

The massive cyberattack targeted at China’s AI start-up DeepSeek in recent days originated in the US, according to China’s state broadcaster.

The cyberattack on DeepSeek started on January 3 and reached a peak on Monday and Tuesday with a massive brute-force attack from US IP addresses, said Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account affiliated with China’s state broadcaster CCTV, on Wednesday.

DeepSeek last week launched a free and open sourced AI assistant that claimed to use less data at a fraction of the cost of incumbent US artificial models, which was regarded by some as a “Sputnik moment” for America’s AI industry for possibly marking a turning point in the level of investment needed for AI.

The earlier stage of the cyberattack contained more distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that aimed to disrupt DeepSeek’s normal service by overwhelming its servers and bandwidth with a flood of internet traffic, and the more recent attacks were primarily brute-force attacks, aiming to crack user ID and passwords in an effort to understand how DeepSeek works, said CCTV, quoting a report from China’s cybersecurity company QAX Technology Group.

A brute-force attack will systematically check all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found. With the compromised ID and passwords, the attacker can pretend to be the registered users of web services to use and analyse their services.

“All the attack IPs were recorded, all are from the US,” Wang Hui, a QAX cybersecurity expert, told CCTV.

  

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