Soon after the Chinese generative artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek emerged to compete with ChatGPT and Gemini, it was forced offline when “large-scale malicious attacks” targeted its servers. Speculation points to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
Security researchers reported that DeepSeek “left one of its databases exposed on the internet, which could have allowed malicious actors to gain access to sensitive data… [t]he exposure also includes more than a million lines of log streams containing chat history, secret keys, backend details, and other highly sensitive information, such as API Secrets and operational metadata.”
On top of that, security researchers identified two malicious packages using the DeepSeek name posted to the Python Package Index (PyPI) starting on January 29, 2025. The packages are named deepseeek and deepseekai, which are “ostensibly client libraries for access to and interacting with the DeepSeek AI API, but they contained functions designed to collect user and computer data, as well as environment variables, which may contain API keys for cloud storage services, database credentials, etc.” Although PyPI quarantined the packages, developers worldwide downloaded them without knowing they were malicious. Researchers are warning developers to be careful with newly released packages “that pose as wrappers for popular services.”
Additionally, due to DeepSeek’s popularity, it is warning X users of fake social media accounts impersonating the company.
But wait, there’s more! Cybersecurity firms are looking closely at DeepSeek and are finding security flaws. One firm, Kela, 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.” DeepSeek’s chatbot provided completely made-up information to a query in one instance. The firm stated, “This response underscores that some outputs generated by DeepSeek are not trustworthy, highlighting the model’s lack of reliability and accuracy. Users cannot depend on DeepSeek for accurate or credible information in such cases.”
We remind our readers that TikTok and DeepSeek are based in China, and the same national security concerns apply to both companies. DeepSeek is unavailable in Italy due to information requests from the Italian DPA, Garante. The Irish Data Protection Commissioner is also requesting information from DeepSeek. In addition, there are reports that U.S.-based AI companies are investigating whether DeepSeek used OpenAI’s API to train its models without permission. Beware of DeepSeek’s risks and limitations, and consider refraining from using it at the present time. “As generative AI platforms from foreign adversaries enter the market, users should question the origin of the data used to train these technologies. They should also question the ownership of this data and ensure it was used ethically to generate responses,” said Jennifer Mahoney, Advisory Practice Manager, Data Governance, Privacy and Protection at Optiv. “Since privacy laws vary across countries, it’s important to be mindful of who’s accessing the information you input into these platforms and what’s being done with it.”