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An attack on ChatGPT creator OpenAI has been claimed by the infamous DDoS threat group Anonymous Sudan and its allies.
The threat actor took to Telegram to announce that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) on the artificial intelligence (AI) giant had caused outages, providing proof through screenshots of Downdetector showing outages on 14 February 2024.
“ChatGPT, you cannot fix your poor protection? Thank you Cloudflare for the worst protection,” it wrote beneath in a post shared by the group’s leader, Crush.
The group followed up with additional screenshots of ChatGPT displaying error messages such as “Error in Moderation” as well as outage notices on the OpenAI site.
The attack on OpenAI is heavily politically motivated, as is usually the case with Anonymous Sudan. In this case, it targeted OpenAI for its support of Israel in the midst of the current conflict between it and Hamas.
The group posted screenshots of it asking ChatGPT two questions – “Do Israelis deserve justice?” and “Do Palestinians deserve justice”, with the responses generally being the same, saying all people generally deserve justice, but adding for the Palestinians that it is a “complex and highly debated issue” due to the war.
“We have hit ChatGPT & openAI strongly for many reasons,” said Anonymous Sudan.
“OpenAI’s cooperation with the occupation state of Israel and the CEO of OpenAI saying he’s willing to invest into Israel more, and his several meetings with Israeli officials like Netanyahu, as Reuters reported.
“AI is now being used in the development of weapons and by intelligence agencies like Mossad, and Israel also employs AI to further oppress the Palestinians.
“ChatGPT has a general biasness towards Israel and against Palestine as it has been exposed in twitter, in general there’s huge bias of the model towards some topics which has to be fixed.
“OpenAI is an American company, and we still are targeting any American company.”
Additionally, Anonymous Sudan specifically named the head of research platform at OpenAI, Tal Broda, calling him out for his anti-Palestinian and anti-Hamas comments on X.
“Attacks will continue if above issues weren’t resolved, especially firing Tal Broda,” it said.
The threat group posted a screenshot from Tal Broda’s X account dated 10 October 2023, which said: “More! No mercy! @IDF don’t stop!” in response to an image of bombed ruins in Gaza.
A search on X reveals that Tal Broda has no shortage of angry words for Hamas and Palestine, with X account @StopArabHate posting a number of screenshots of Broda’s now deleted posts.
“Clean southern Gaza”
— Stop Arab Hate (@StopArabHate) December 13, 2023
More content from Tal Broda… pic.twitter.com/bi3AZuzrVq
These posts date back as far as 2014, with Broda tweeting: “Don’t kid yourself. There is no Palestine. There never was, and never will be.”
Broda has since issued an apology for the posts, which have now been deleted.
“I want to address a few tweets that I deleted several weeks ago. Those tweets understandably caused discomfort and hurt. I am responsible for that, and I am sorry,” he wrote.
“I was shocked and very sad after the horrific massacre by Hamas on October 7th in Israel, and personally know a lot of people who were impacted by it. My intention was to voice my opposition to Hamas, and never towards the civilians in Gaza, who I know are suffering at this time.
“Reflecting on the words I chose, I realise that they don’t represent my intention or my values. This has been a learning experience for me, and I intend to ensure that going forward my actions and words reflect my principles.”
— Tal Broda 🇮🇱 🇺🇲 (@talbroda) December 17, 2023
Cyber Daily has since observed that ChatGPT is back up and running.
Since the OpenAI attack, Anonymous Sudan and its ally SkyNet have claimed attacks on Steam and Discord but provided no political commentary outside of slamming Cloudflare for its poor security.
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