Trojans disguised as AI: cybercriminals exploit DeepSeek’s popularity


Among the most significant events in the AI world in early 2025 was the release of DeepSeek-R1 – a powerful reasoning large language model (LLM) with open weights. It’s available both for local use and as a free service. Since DeepSeek was the first service to offer access to a reasoning LLM to a wide audience, it quickly gained popularity, mirroring the success of ChatGPT.

Naturally, this surge in interest also attracted cybercriminals. While analyzing our internal threat intelligence data, we discovered several groups of websites mimicking the official DeepSeek chatbot site and distributing malicious code disguised as a client for the popular service.

Read more…
Source: Kaspersky


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Verizon’s 2020 DBIR

    May 19, 2020

    Verizon’s 2020 DBIR is out, you can download a copy or peruse their publication online. Kaspersky was a contributor once again, and we are happy to provide generalized incident data from our unique and objective research. We have contributed to this project and others like it for years now. This year’s ~120 page report analyses data from ...

  • NXNSAttack technique can be abused for large-scale DDoS attacks

    May 19, 2020

    A team of academics from Israel has disclosed today details about NXNSAttack, a vulnerability in DNS servers that can be abused to launch DDoS attacks of massive proportions. According to the research team, NXNSAttack impacts recursive DNS servers and the process of DNS delegation. Recursive DNS servers are DNS systems that pass DNS queries upstream in order to ...

  • Eleethub: A Cryptocurrency Mining Botnet with Rootkit for Self-Hiding

    May 18, 2020

    Unit 42 researchers uncovered a new botnet campaign using Perl Shellbot, intended to mine Bitcoin, while avoiding detection using a specially crafted rootkit. The bot is propagated by sending a malicious shell script to a compromised device that then downloads other scripts. After the victim device executes the downloaded scripts, it starts waiting for commands from its ...

  • Easyjet hacked: 9 million people’s data accessed plus 2,200 credit card details grabbed

    May 17, 2020

    Budget British airline Easyjet has been hacked, it has told the stock markets, admitting nine million people’s details were accessed and more than 2,000 customers’ credit card details stolen. Some information about the attack was released to the London Stock Exchange by the company, which claimed it had been targeted by “a highly sophisticated source”. Email addresses and “travel ...

  • Mirai and Hoaxcalls Botnets Target Legacy Symantec Web Gateways

    May 14, 2020

    As part of Unit 42’s efforts to proactively monitor threats circulating in the wild, I recently came across new Hoaxcalls and Mirai botnet campaigns targeting a post-authentication Remote Code Execution vulnerability in Symantec Secure Web Gateway 5.0.2.8, which is a product that became end-of-life (EOL) in 2015 and end-of-support-life (EOSL) in 2019. There is no ...

  • COMpfun authors spoof visa application with HTTP status-based Trojan

    May 14, 2020

    You may remember that in autumn 2019 we published a story about how a COMpfun successor known as Reductor infected files on the fly to compromise TLS traffic. If you’re wondering whether the actor behind the malware is still developing new features, the answer is yes. Later in November 2019 our Attribution Engine revealed a new Trojan with ...