Chinese media reports claim that the US is responsible for the January 3 cyberattacks against China’s AI model DeepSeek.
According to cybersecurity specialists, the attacks peaked earlier this week with a big brute-force attempt coming from US IP addresses.
Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks were used in the attack’s first phase in an effort to overload DeepSeek’s servers and interfere with its business activities.
Read also: DeepSeek’s emergence worries Trump, serves as wakeup call to U.S. tech companies
Cyber attacks aim to gain understanding of how DeepSeek works
According to a report by China’s cybersecurity company QAX Technology Group, as the attacks developed, they switched to brute-force techniques meant to break user IDs and passwords in order to gain a better understanding of how the model worked.
The supremacy of US-based behemoths like OpenAI, Google, and Meta was questioned earlier this month when DeepSeek released their open-source AI model, R1.
Compared to its Western competitors, DeepSeek’s language model uses fewer resources, which has led to its quick rise in popularity.
Major Western tech companies like Nvidia have seen large market losses as a result of its growth.