China accuses US hackers of cyberattacks on DeepSeek

According to CCTV, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek was targeted by American hackers who carried out a large-scale cyberattack on the company. Interestingly, the date of the attack and the release of the R1 model coincide.

This was reported by Interesting Engineering.

When did the attack happen and what was the extent of the attack?

It all started on January 3rd and culminated on Monday and Tuesday when DeepSeek was subjected to massive brute force attacks from IP addresses registered in the United States. The attack occurred shortly after the launch of a new AI model.

The cyber attack took place in several stages. First, DeepSeek was subjected to DDoS attacks, which, according to the South China Morning Post, overloaded servers and disrupted the stable operation of the platform.

Later, the attack evolved into brute force hacking, a method of systematically selecting logins and passwords to gain access to the system. XLab experts reported that the attacks became more sophisticated and larger in scale.

They believe the attackers were trying to break into the DeepSeek system and gain access to its AI model.

At the same time, the XLab report showed that the attacks came not only from the United States, but also from Singapore, the Netherlands, Germany, and even China.

Due to the ongoing attacks, DeepSeek has decided to limit new user registration to mainland Chinese mobile number holders only.

The cyberattack coincided with the January 10 release of a new open-source AI model, DeepSeek-R1, which received positive reviews for its competitiveness and lower cost compared to its American counterparts. Such successes attracted the attention of the global AI community and, according to some reports, caused concern among American policymakers.

As a reminder, OpenAI accused DeepSeek of illegally using data to train its AI models. Nevertheless, the American company has repeatedly violated copyrights itself.

We also wrote that DeepSeek is currently under investigation in the United States and Europe. Due to the situation with a massive leak of confidential data in Italy, the app has already been removed from the App Store.