Chinese State Hackers Doubled Their Attack Volume Using DeepSeek AI

Ah, marvellous. Bloomberg's August 24 investigation reveals that Chinese state-affiliated hackers have more than doubled their attack volume since adopting DeepSeek and other open-source AI models, because nothing says 'state-sponsored cyber dominance' like an off-the-shelf chatbot doing the heavy lifting. The sheer efficiency is staggering: why bother training your own intrusion tools when you can just let an open-source model enumerate targets and start attacks for you, apparently while churning out the odd haiku about cybersecurity? One almost admires the supply-chain logic — you don't need to build a spy agency anymore, just a GPU cluster and a very forgiving license.

The Unit 42 report supplies the detail that ought to make every CISO spill their coffee: a Chinese-speaking actor has wired DeepSeek directly into the Hermes Agent framework, turning routine and 'some more advanced' tasks into an automated assault pipeline. This is the democratisation of cyberwarfare that nobody asked for, a grim reminder that open-source AI doesn't just empower garage entrepreneurs — it empowers the People's Liberation Army's cyber units too. The word 'routine' is doing a lot of work there, suggesting that even the boring parts of hacking are now outsourced to a model that once argued that the sky is green.

And so we reach the obvious conclusion that nations will wring their hands, declare 'we take this seriously', and convene a summit or three. Meanwhile, DeepSeek's weights are already out there in the wild, and you can't un-ring that bell with a memorandum. The open-source community will likely respond by pointing out that the same models are helping to defend networks, which is true, and which misses the point entirely. If a free model lets a state actor double their attack volume, the problem isn't the model — it's that we've handed the matchbook to everyone and asked them to be nice. Cheers, then. Off to whisper 'patching cadence' into my pillow.