OpenAI has recently been dealing with a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks aimed at its API and ChatGPT services. These attacks have caused periodic outages and disruptions for users accessing ChatGPT.
While OpenAI has not disclosed the specific details regarding the source of these attacks, they have acknowledged the abnormal traffic pattern indicative of a DDoS attack.
Users affected by these incidents have reported encountering errors when trying to access ChatGPT, such as “something seems to have gone wrong” and “There was an error generating a response.”
This recent wave of attacks follows a major outage on Wednesday, as well as partial outages on Tuesday and elevated error rates on Monday. OpenAI has displayed a banner attributing these disruptions to exceptionally high demand and has assured users that they are working to scale their systems.
Anonymous Sudan, a threat actor group, has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks on OpenAI. They allege that these attacks are in response to OpenAI’s perceived bias towards Israel and against Palestine.
The attackers utilized the SkyNet botnet, which recently added support for Layer 7 (L7) DDoS attacks. In Layer 7 attacks, threat actors overwhelm services at the application level with a massive volume of requests, straining the target’s server and network resources.
Brad Freeman, Director of Technology at SenseOn, commented on the situation, stating that while DDoS attacks are typically more of a nuisance than a long-term threat, OpenAI will need to make changes to mitigate the attack since it is targeting the application itself. Freeman also speculated whether the threat actor is using AI-generated content to attack AI content generation.
However, cybersecurity researchers have raised suspicions about the attribution of these attacks to Anonymous Sudan. Some experts suggest that this could be a false flag operation and that the group may have connections to Russia, which, along with Iran, is suspected of exploiting the conflict between Israel and Palestine for its own interests.
This situation highlights the ongoing challenges faced by organizations dealing with DDoS attacks and the complexities of accurately identifying the perpetrators.
(Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash)
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