When the Chinese start‑up DeepSeek released its R‑1 chatbot in January 2025, the launch felt like a Silicon Valley fairytale told in Mandarin. Two months and 57 million downloads later, the numbers were jaw‑dropping. On Apple’s US app store, it eclipsed ChatGPT; in India, it jostled for the top spot in every major language category. Reporters praised its fluency and its price tag: free.

What mattered less in that honeymoon week was how the software moved across the internet. On April 16, researchers working with the US House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) released their report, ‘DeepSeek Unmasked: Exposing the CCP’s Latest Tool for Spying, Stealing, and Subverting U.S. Export Control Restrictions’, revealing that every user prompt, device fingerprint and behavioural tic is routed across the Pacific to servers run by China Mobile — a carrier the US Department of Defense lists under Section 1260H as a Chinese military company.

The first rupture appeared on January 29 when cloud security firm Wiz stumbled upon an exposed ClickHouse database tagged “ds‑log‑prod‑001". Anyone with a browser could have accessed more than a million log lines: raw chat history, API keys, and even internal service tokens. Wiz engineers demonstrated that with two clicks they could seize “full database control", inject malicious code and pivot into the rest of DeepSeek’s infrastructure.

A week later mobile forensics specialists at NowSecure published a parallel autopsy of the iOS build. Their findings read like a checklist of everything Apple’s security team tells developers not to do: hard‑coded encryption keys, deprecated 3DES ciphers and App Transport Security switched off globally, allowing chats to travel unencrypted. The company urged enterprises to ban the app outright. However, DeepSeek’s parentage turned out to be even more troubling.

Corporate registries in Zhejiang and the Cayman Islands show the chatbot is a wholly owned offshoot of High‑Flyer Quant, a hedge fund founded in 2016 by the 38‑year‑old trader and CEO of Deepseek, Liang Wenfeng. Reuters reporting confirms that........

© News18