DeepSeek halts new signups amid "large-scale" cyberattack

Chinese AI platform DeepSeek has disabled registrations on it DeepSeek-V3 chat platform due to an ongoing "large-scale" cyberattack targeting its services.

DeepSeek is a relatively new AI platform that has quickly gained attention over the past week for its development and release of an advanced AI model that allegedly matches or outperforms the capabilities of US  tech giant's models at significantly lower costs.

The news of the new model led to a massive sell-off in the US stock market as the AI arms race heats up.

However, with this surge in popularity comes the attention of threat actors, or as some believe, their corporate rivals.

Today, just as the DeepSeek AI Assistant app overtook ChatGPT as the top downloaded app on the Apple App Store, the company was forced to turn off new registrations after suffering a cyberattack.

"Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service," reads a message on the DeepSeek status page.

"Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support."

While no details about the attack were shared, it is believed that the company is facing a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against its API and Web Chat platform.

A DDoS attack is when a large amount of traffic is sent to a particular IP address or URL, which uses up the available resources on the devices. This causes the services to no longer function anymore until the DDoS attack is mitigated or stopped.

While the attack is impacting their registration process, you can now log in with your Google account to gain access.

In doing so, you will share your name, email address, language preference, and profile picture with DeepSeek.

Now that DeepSeek has seen immense media attention, it is also being heavily scrutinized by cybersecurity researchers.

Today, cybersecurity firm KELA reported that it was able to jailbreak the model to produce malicious outputs.

"KELA has observed that while DeepSeek R1 bears similarities to ChatGPT, it is significantly more vulnerable," reads KELA's report.

"KELA's AI Red Team was able to jailbreak the model across a wide range of scenarios, enabling it to generate malicious outputs, such as ransomware development, fabrication of sensitive content, and detailed instructions for creating toxins and explosive devices.

BleepingComputer reached out to DeepSeek to learn more about the attack but did not receive a response.

Source

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