Exposed DeepSeek database leaking sensitive information, including chat history

> Or do devs around the world just have to bite the bullet and learn enough English to be able to use the majority of tools?

That is precisely what happens. It is not unusual for code and databases to be written in English, even when the developers are from a non-English speaking country. Think about it: the toolchain, programming language and libraries are all based on English anyway.

It might seem less credible to encounter English in a place where it’s less expected, but think of it this way: would a Yandex-developed ClickHouse database be adopted by Chinese devs if everything in it were written in Russian?

There is some merit in asking your question, for there’s an unspoken rule (and a source of endless frustration) that business-/domain-related terms should remain in the language of their origin. Otherwise, (real-life story) "Leitungsauskunft" could end up being translated as "line information" or even "channel interface" ("pipeline inquiry" should be correct, it's a type of document you can procure from the [German] government).

Ironically, I’m currently working in an environment where we decided to translate such terms, and it hasn’t helped with understanding of the business logic at all. Furthermore, it adds an element of surprise and a topic for debate whenever somebody comes up with a "more accurate translation".

So if anything, English is a sign of a battle-hardened developer, until they try to convert proper names.

Someone who worked on a non-English environment years ago here: sometimes you do use the local language in some contexts, but, more often than not, you end up using English for the majority of stuff since it's a bit off-putting to mix another language with the English of programming languages and APIs.

Almost all software engineers learn a passing amount of English - truly localized programming environments are quite esoteric and not really available for most mainstream use cases I can think of.

Depending on the company culture and policy, the most common thing to see is a mix of English variable and function names with native-language comments. Occasionally you will see native-language variable and function names. This is much more common in Latin character set languages (especially among Spanish and Portuguese speakers) in my experience; almost all Chinese code seems to use approximately-English variable and function names.

Not only that, DeepSeek "thinks" in English!

When I interact with it by asking it a question in Spanish, the parts between the <think> ... </think> are in English before it goes on to answer in Spanish.

Give it a try in your favourite language.

I went on to ask it if it "thinks" in English, Spanish or Chinese but it just gives the pat answer that, being an LLM, it doesn't think in any language.

I've been doing SWE for 10+ years in Poland and I encountered non-English language in code precisely once - in a German project, lol. Some guys do leave Polish comments here and there, or in commit messages or in other docs/jira tickets/whatever - but in db schema, variables, properties, methods etc? Never, ever. English is 100% a requirement for every developer job offer I've ever encountered in Poland. Not necessarily a very high level for programmers (if you don't speak directly with the client), but you wouldn't get an offer at all if you're very far below B1.

I mean we're kind of an outsourcing hub so it makes sense. Even some of our companies outsource further to the east so you really can't avoid it.

> Or do devs around the world just have to bite the bullet and learn enough English to be able to use the majority of tools?

I'm a native English speaker, but from looking at various code bases written by people who aren't, I gather that it's basically this. It wasn't too long ago that one couldn't even reliably feed non-ASCII comments to a lot of compilers, let alone variable and function names.

I am European, however I have worked with developers from various parts of Asia and South America. English is usually a second language, however most developers are fairly fluent using it as a spoken or written language. Also, most development resources are written in English, so all developers know how to read it. Programming languages and their standard libraries are also written in English. It's the lingua franca worldwide, so we are all happy to use it in the technical context.

were these "dev" domains holding real production data? the blog post does not clear it for me.

> but most probably was training data to prevent deepseek from completing such prompts, evidenced by the `"finish_reason":"stop"` included in the span attributes

As I understand, the finish reason being “stop” in API responses usually means the AI ended the output normally. In any case, I don't see how training data could end up in production logs, nor why they'd want to prevent such data (a prompt you'd expect to see a normal user to write) from being responded to.

> [...] I'm guessing Wiz wanted to ride the current media wave with this post instead of seeing how far they could take it.

Security researchers are often asked to not pursue findings further than confirming their existence. It can be unhelpful or mess things up accidentally. Since these researchers probably weren't invited to deeply test their systems, I think it's the polite way to go about it.

This mistake was totally amateur hour by DeepSeek, though. I'm not too into security stuff but if I were looking for something, the first thing I'd think to do is nmap the servers and see what's up with any interesting open ports. Wouldn't be surprised at all if others had found this too.

AFAIK, Opensource Elasticsearch does not offer any form of authentication upon installation for many years but ClickHouse does and in fact I'm often surprised at how many authentication mechanisms were introduced over the years and can be easily configured:

- Password authentication (bcrypt, sha256 hashes) - Certificate authentication (Fantastic for server to server communication) - SSH key authentication (Personally, this is my favourite - every database should have this authentication mechanism to make it easy for Dev to work with)

Not very popular but LDAP and Http Authentication Server are also great options.

I also wonder how DeepSeek engineers deployed their ClickHouse instance. When I deployed using yum/apt install, the installation step literally ask you to input a default password.

And if you were to set it up manually with ClickHouse binary, the out-of-the-box config seal the instance from external network access and the default user is only exposed to localhost as explained by Alex here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42871371#42873446.

Which was originally the open exposed mongo server, then mysql/phpmyadmin, then exposed ftp, and then exposed telnet.

Shows how old I am. Thought we were still in the "exposed ElasticSearch" era.

open exposed S3 bucket is this decade's open exposed S3 bucket so common in the past

Your posturing is unwarranted. Literally in the first paragraph:

> The Wiz Research team immediately and responsibly disclosed the issue to DeepSeek, which promptly secured the exposure

They left open a publicly exposed database... I'm sure they informed the company about this before publishing their post. Why are you blaming Wiz for this?

The CFAA is a US law. Assuming you break it, in order for that to matter, an American prosecutor needs to find time to prosecute you for doing so. Does Deepseek have any American presence at all?

Likewise, there may be Chinese laws were violated. However, outside of China they are a moot point.

I agree to your comment, but also there's probably an unspoken gentleman's agreement that DeepSeek fixed the issue and won't pursue legal action against Wiz, since they were helpful and didn't do anything malicious.

I did the same a while ago, an education platform startup had their web server misconfigured, I could clone their repo locally because .git was accessible. I immediately sent them an email from a throwaway account in case they wanted to get me in trouble and informed them about the configuration issues. They thanked me for the warning and suggestions, and even said they could get me a job at their company.

They're publicly accessible URLs.

DeepSeek & users that had data exposed here should be thanking Wiz.

lol

Yes but they’re chinese so it’s okay /s

They are getting DoS’d by us gov too so they were only trying to help /s

Not many non-gamers have hardware capable of running such a model locally - never mind the skills.

For most people, bash is not a tool for interacting with the computer, it is how they express their frustration with the computer (sometimes leaving damaged keyboards).

You could also use models that run on nvidia’s trusted execution environment.

It's also deeply damaging to the western ego, especially one rooted in American exceptionalism.

But also one those of us actually working on foundational AI saw coming a mile away when most of the top research of late has been happening in Chinese labs, not American or European ones.

Can't wait to see what this boneheaded President's tarrif on TSMC does to this situation.

The hit on NVidia's stock price makes no sense to me.

DeepSeek uses H100s and H800s. They'll likely have reasons to buy more now, and America will want to compete even harder, buying more chips.

American companies are still way ahead as well, but they're just getting more competition. This will be healthy.

I'm sure some people did actually get hurt by NVIDIA's stock dropping, but it's also important to keep the size of the effect in perspective: NVIDIA's stock is back to where it was in September of last year, and still up almost 1900% from 5 years ago and up 103% from a year ago.

NVIDIA's stock has been super bubbly—all DeepSeek did was set off itchy investor trigger fingers that were already worried about its highly inflated price.

Every intelligent colleague is an interesting mix of 'sour but intrigued'

Personally, I know I've lost a lot of street cred amongst certain work circles in recent history as far as my thoughts of 'shops should pursue local LLM solutions[0]' and the '$6000 4-8 tokens/second local LLM box' post making the rounds [1] hopefully gives orgs a better idea of what LLMs can do if we keep them from being 100% SAASlike in structure.

I think a big litmus test for some orgs in near future, is whether they keep 'buying ChatGPT' or instead find a good way to quickly customize or at least properly deploy such models.

[0] - I mean, for starters, a locally hosted LLM resolves a LOT of concerns around infosec....

[1] - Very thankful a colleague shared that with me...

Obviously a lot of people are long Nvidia stock, and based on the comments are in the denial stage of grief.

"This is good for Nvidia" is the 2025 version of "this is good for bitcoin"

Also American pride. China is on track to outpace the US in technical, military and economic dominance.

A lot of people want to poke at Chinese weakness wherever it’s exposed because Americans are used to being the best and also unconscious racism. When Japan was about to overtake the US the US pulled some similar moves and that is partly what’s responsible for japans current economic funk. It’s unlikely these moves will work on China.

I'm not seeing any vitriol or comments that are outside the norm, except people defending DeepSeek and throwing accusations left and right for seemingly no reason at all. That's the actually surprising data.

+1. I also enjoy the "China be stealin' ur data and personal info" angle. As if the incumbents haven't already done that, and are still doing it, as their core business practices.

This whole thing should be an eye-opener to most people.

To ask an honest question, who gives a crap if a Chinese company manages to grab data that many of the usual Silicon Valley suspects have had all along and have been incrementally updating? How is this a "threat".

To pile on another gripe, why the hell does every single media outlet point out the "Tienanmen Square" question?

The whole thing has just become embarrassing. I honestly can't fathom what worse China could do with my personal info than the likes of say, Meta. I'm not saying I would enjoy it, but I just don't see how it could be more harmful than the Silicon Valley status quo.

Hopefully this is a lesson not to trust your sensitive private data with a public service?

I've been redacting my keys before sending config to chatgpt, it's a pain but I guess this shows it's worth the effort.