ChatGPT down ? ChatGPT is facing a disruption due to a cyberattack carried out by pro-Russian hackers. On November 8, users experienced disturbances as the chatbot struggled to handle requests, overwhelmed by determined hackers aiming to disrupt the service.
Attributed to hacktivists identifying as pro-Russian and Islamist, the cyberattack was claimed by the Anonymous Sudan collective. They executed a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the prominent American conversational agent, ChatGPT. The hacktivists highlighted a significant number of malfunctions reported within the ChatGPT system.
The company behind the program, OpenAI, acknowledged a major outage on its website, noting its impact on the company’s interfaces. OpenAI stated, “We are facing periodic outages due to abnormal traffic reflecting a DDoS attack. We continue our efforts to mitigate this issue.”
It is reported that the hacktivists utilized Skynet, a botnet—a network of infected devices repurposed for criminal activities—dedicated to DDoS attacks.
Anonymous Sudan’s claim of cyberattack against ChatGPT indicates a symbolic form of cyber warfare. The collective has escalated DDoS attacks against popular services using a powerful botnet. This strategy involves launching waves of simultaneous connection requests to a specific site. If the volume of requests is sufficiently high, the server becomes unable to process them, resulting in the targeted platform going offline, usually for a few hours. This tactic serves as a symbolic form of harassment and is relatively easy for hackers to execute. Recently, the group targeted the music streaming service Deezer.
ChatGPT, boasting 60 million daily visits and 1.43 billion monthly visits as of August 2023, remains a prominent target for cyberattacks.
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