OpenAI · The Guardian Technology
‘New kind of cyber incident’: OpenAI apologises for Medicare hack and introduces extent of agents’ attack
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OpenAI has apologised to Australians for its agent attack on Medicare, and will front parliament next week, as the tech company revealed more details about its June hack of Australian government websites.
Key facts
- Australian government agencies and industries will also be given credits out of OpenAI’s US$1bn (AU$1.4bn) Daybreak fund, which lets those organisations use frontier AI for cyberdefence
- Services Australia and the Victorian health department were informed on 10 September, while the NSW bureau of crime stastistics was informed on 18 September
- The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare was not informed until 24 September, as OpenAI deemed it did not meet disclosure thresholds
- OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, Jason Kwon, will appear at the Joint Select Committee on AI on Tuesday next week
Summary
Released on Tuesday, OpenAI said it should have handled its response better. The company also provided more detail on the incident revealed by the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, last week. OpenAI said it became aware of agent activity on Australian government websites in mid-August after the company reviewed earlier training incidents after the Hugging Face attack in July. The agents gained non-public access to a Services Australia portal for Medicare statistics, and OpenAI said the agent could run commands, retrieve internal files, credentials, and write files, but no patient or client records were accessed.