OpenAI suffered a very significant outage on Wednesday, which made ChatGPT unavailable for several hours. The pro-Russian group Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for what could be a computer attack.
Many curious people, individuals and professionals reported on Wednesday afternoon and into the evening, an outage of OpenAI services, more particularly of the ChatGPT conversational robot. We learned, at the end of the day, that the incident could have been caused by a DDoS type cyberattack (distributed denial of service attack). The latter was claimed by the pro-Islamic and pro-Russian group Anonymous Sudan, which also has quite a hunting record.
ChatGPT paralyzed for a good two hours on Wednesday
Less than 48 hours after dazzling generative AI specialists with its DevDay, OpenAI experienced a disastrous day on Wednesday. The American company initially indicated that it had “ identified an issue causing high error rates in the API and ChatGPT », before claiming to have implemented a fix less than two hours after becoming aware of the problem.
Meanwhile, OpenAI reported “ errors affecting all services », therefore reassuring of a return to normal 2 hours after the start of the incident which paralyzed ChatGPT. But what happened? And is this incident due to external intervention?
If we are to believe the claims of the group Anonymous Sudan, it would seem so. The hacker collective, which has specialized in religiously motivated DDoS attacks against Western countries since the beginning of 2023, claimed responsibility for the attack on its Telegram channel.
A group of hackers specializing in large DDoS attacks claims responsibility for the cyberattack
Although there is at this stage no official material proof of Anonymous Sudan’s attack on ChatGPT, the hacker group had already claimed responsibility for an attack on the OpenAI website last May. A month later, we learned that 100,000 ChatGPT accounts (including 3,000 French) had ended up on the dark web, thanks to an infostealer (an information thief), known as Raccoon.
Earlier this year, in March, OpenAI acknowledged a security incident that exposed extensive data such as names, email addresses, chat histories and payment details. To carry out the alleged cyberattack of November 8, Anonymous Sudan allegedly received support from Skynet. What is certain is that this group has already made many victims, and not the least: Microsoft, Numerama whisper the name to us, like Deezer.
Anonymous Sudan’s specialty: DDoS attacks, which generally come from tens of thousands of unique IP addresses, whose request waves are extremely powerful, up to several million requests per second. The group relies on a shared cloud infrastructure to manage its traffic, as well as free open proxy infrastructures to hide the source of its attacks.
Sources: Clubic, OpenAI, Numerama, The Cyber Express
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