Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek, which has taken the market by storm, has temporarily limited new user registrations following a large-scale cyberattack that disrupted its services.
According to Reuters, the attack coincided with the company’s AI assistant becoming the top-rated free application on Apple’s App Store in the United States.
The attack affected the registration process for new users, although current users were able to carry on accessing the platform as usual. The company said that it had resolved issues related to its application programming interface (API) and user login problems, marking the longest service outage in around 90 days.
The cyberattack comes hot on the heels of DeepSeek’s rapid ascent in the AI industry. The startup recently unveiled its ChatGPT-like AI model, R1, which offers similar capabilities at a fraction of the cost of models from US tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
DeepSeek reported spending just $5.6 million on computing power for its base model, a vast contrast to the hundreds or even millions or billions of dollars invested by its American counterparts.
The company’s debut has disrupted the AI market and raised concerns about cybersecurity and data privacy. According to The Hacker News, security researchers have identified vulnerabilities in DeepSeek’s platform, including prompt injection and cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws, which could potentially allow malefactors to execute malicious code and gain unsanctioned access to users’ accounts.
In response to the attack, DeepSeek has put measures in place to strengthen its security infrastructure and is conducting a full investigation to prevent any future incidents. It has not disclosed any specific details about the nature of the attack or the parties responsible.
A Critical Challenge for US Businesses
Gal Ringel, Co-Founder, and CEO at Mine, believes the emergence of this Chinese alternative to ChatGPT poses a critical security challenge for US businesses, extending beyond previous concerns about consumer data privacy, to the potential exposure of proprietary business information, trade secrets, and strategic corporate information.
“Just as TikTok raised red flags about personal data exposure, DeepSeek’s AI tools apply the same rules of risk to sensitive corporate information. Organizations must now urgently audit and track their AI assets to prevent potential data exposure to China. This isn’t just about knowing what AI tools are being used; it’s about understanding where company data flows and ensuring robust safeguards are in place so it doesn’t inadvertently end up in the wrong hands. The parallels to TikTok are striking, but the stakes may be even higher when considering the potential exposure of business data ending up in adversarial hands.”
Availability, Confidentiality, Integrity
“One of the key tenets of cybersecurity is availability,” says Erich Kron, Security Awareness Advocate at KnowBe4. “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 its customers.”
Kron says that with DeepSeek’s growing popularity, it’s not a huge surprise that it is 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.”
Cyberattacks can come from anywhere in the world, Kron continues, targeting any organization with an online presence. In response, companies often take measures like pausing new user registrations to free up resources, which may help existing users but can frustrate potential new subscribers and harm the business. With internet outages costing organizations millions per hour, the risk of these attacks is real and requires careful planning.
A Victim of Its Own Success
Toby Lewis, Global Head of Threat Analysis at Darktrace, says the reported cyber-attack on DeepSeek probably falls into one of several scenarios, with the most likely being simply a victim of its own success. “This is what we in tech circles call the ‘Slashdot effect,’ where their infrastructure buckled under unexpected user demand following their viral moment on the App Store.”
However, Lewis says we shouldn’t dismiss security concerns, because considering the rapid deployment of their platform, there’s a real possibility that opportunistic attackers identified and exploited potential vulnerabilities that more established platforms have had time to address.
“This incident serves as another reminder that security cannot be an afterthought – it must be woven into the very foundations of these systems from the outset. As AI platforms continue to scale rapidly and handle increasingly sensitive data, robust security frameworks aren’t just nice to have features, they’re essential,” Lewis says.
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