In a shocking discovery, Israel’s Wiz Cybersecurity, a unicorn, uncovered a glaring security vulnerability within DeepSeek’s infrastructure—a publicly accessible ClickHouse database, left wide open to potential exploitation. This critical exposure granted full control over database operations, making internal data alarmingly vulnerable.
Among the trove of exposed information were over a million lines of log streams, containing sensitive chat history, secret keys, backend details, and other highly confidential data. Had malicious actors stumbled upon this flaw, the consequences could have been catastrophic.
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Acting swiftly and responsibly, the Wiz Research team immediately alerted DeepSeek to the breach. In response, DeepSeek took rapid action to secure the exposed database, narrowly averting a major data security crisis. This incident serves as a stark reminder of the ever-present risks in the digital landscape and the crucial role of vigilant cybersecurity research.
DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence company that develops open-source large language models (LLMs). DeepSeek is notable for making its AI models and training details open-source. This allows for greater transparency and collaboration within the AI community.
DeepSeek is an emerging player in the AI field, making waves with its open-source approach and cost-effective models. They are definitely a company to watch as they continue to develop and release new AI technologies.
the Wiz Research team said that it “set out to assess its external security posture and identify any potential vulnerabilities.” Within minutes, they found a publicly accessible ClickHouse database linked to DeepSeek, “completely open and unauthenticated, exposing sensitive data.” It was hosted at oauth2callback.deepseek.com:9000 and dev.deepseek.com:9000.
ClickHouse is an open-source, columnar database management system designed for fast analytical queries on large datasets, explained Wiz. It was developed by Yandex and is widely used for real-time data processing, log storage, and big data analytics, which indicates such exposure as a very valuable and sensitive discovery.
“This level of access posed a critical risk to DeepSeek’s own security and for its end-users. Not only an attacker could retrieve sensitive logs and actual plain-text chat messages, but they could also potentially exfiltrate plaintext passwords and local files along propriety information directly from the server,” said Wiz.
