Incident: Chat logs open to the internet
Module 12 · Incident file · About 30 minutes
What happened
On 29 January 2025 Gal Nagli of Wiz Research reported that Wiz had found "a publicly accessible ClickHouse database belonging to DeepSeek", the Chinese AI company behind the DeepSeek-R1 model (Wiz, 29 January 2025). ClickHouse is an open-source database often used for log storage. Wiz found it "within minutes" of mapping DeepSeek's public subdomains, on two unusual open ports at oauth2callback.deepseek.com and dev.deepseek.com. It was "completely open and unauthenticated": the database's own web page "allowed direct execution of arbitrary SQL queries via the browser".
One table, log_stream, held "over 1 million log entries", dating from 6 January 2025. Its columns included "Plaintext logs, including Chat History, API Keys, backend details, and operational metadata". Wiz wrote that an attacker could have retrieved "actual plain-text chat messages" and, depending on the configuration, local files from the server; Wiz says it ran nothing beyond listing what was there. It "immediately and responsibly disclosed the issue to DeepSeek, which promptly secured the exposure". Neither Wiz nor BleepingComputer gives the date of the fix, and BleepingComputer noted that "it is unknown if Wiz's researchers were the first to discover this exposure" (BleepingComputer, 30 January 2025). The sources state no cost, and this file adds none.