DeepSeek Attack Reveals AI Security Risks and Cloud‑Native Observability Best Practices

01 Global breakout Chinese large model

DeepSeek, a revolutionary large language model, matches OpenAI‑o1 in performance while dramatically reducing inference cost, earning the nickname “small power, big miracle”. Its new model DeepSeek‑R1 quickly topped the Apple App Store free download charts in China and the US, even surpassing ChatGPT, and its fully open‑source strategy lowers the barrier for AI developers.

02 Massive malicious attacks

On Jan 27‑28 2025 DeepSeek announced a large‑scale malicious attack that disrupted registration, limited non‑China phone numbers, and caused login and API performance issues. Security firms reported continuous overseas attacks, including DDoS floods, password‑brute‑force attempts, NTP and Memcached reflection attacks, and involvement of botnets.

03 Reflections on security challenges

The incidents expose the AI industry’s vulnerability and the urgent need for robust network security. As AI systems become targets, building a secure, observable architecture is essential.

04 Building a secure, observable cloud‑native system on Alibaba Cloud

Traffic first passes through Alibaba Cloud DDoS High‑Protection, then the Web Application Firewall (WAF), followed by CLB load balancing to ECS/ACK resources, with the Cloud Security Center (SAS) providing risk management. Logs from DDoS, WAF, VPC, DNS, and Kubernetes Ingress are collected by Log Service (SLS) and analyzed with machine‑learning functions for anomaly detection and alerting.

Examples include log ingestion, traffic monitoring dashboards, custom log audit, and anomaly detection using SPL operators and machine‑learning functions such as series_decompose_anomalies. Alerts can be configured to notify via SMS, phone, or DingTalk.