OpenAI has been contending with a series of DDoS attacks on its API and ChatGPT services within the last 24 hours. While OpenAI initially withheld details regarding the root cause of these disruptions, they later confirmed that they were indeed a result of ongoing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Users affected by these incidents have been encountering error messages like “something seems to have gone wrong,” and ChatGPT has been unable to generate responses to queries. These incidents follow a recent major ChatGPT outage, which also led to the unavailability of its Application Programming Interface (API), as well as partial ChatGPT outages and elevated error rates for Dall-E on previous days.
Anonymous Sudan, a threat actor, has taken responsibility for these DDoS attacks, asserting that OpenAI’s purported “bias towards Israel and against Palestine” served as the driving force behind their actions.
The attackers, in a statement on their Telegram channel, expressed their intention to expose the impact of the DDoS attacks on ChatGPT, highlighting widespread reports on social media. They also revealed the use of the SkyNet botnet in their attacks, a stresser service that has been operational since October and recently added support for application layer attacks (Layer 7 DDoS attacks).
These developments showcase the vulnerabilities and challenges that organizations like OpenAI face in an increasingly digitized world, where online attacks can be motivated by ideological or geopolitical factors.
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