Cyberattack on DeepSeek, including brute-force assault, started in US: Chinese state media
Early assault on AI start-up reported to include denial-of-service attacks aiming to overwhelm servers and bandwidth with internet traffic
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, Yuyuan Tantian, a social media account affiliated with CCTV, said on Wednesday.
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DeepSeek said on Monday it would temporarily limit new registrations to users with mainland Chinese mobile numbers because of a “large-scale malicious attack” which had resulted in problems in registration.
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, CCTV said, citing a report from Chinese cybersecurity company QAX Technology Group.
It said the more recent attacks were primarily brute-force attacks, aiming to crack user IDs and passwords in an effort to understand how DeepSeek works.
A brute-force attack will systematically check all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found. With the compromised IDs 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.
