Medicare Portal Breach Exposes Australia’s Cybersecurity Gaps
Another data breach has heightened serious concerns about Australia’s preparedness against AI-driven cyber attacks.
Speaking from New York, prime minister Anthony Albanese revealed the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal had been infiltrated by OpenAI back in June, demanding answers from the company’s CEO Sam Altman.
He added that the government was only notified about the breach earlier this month in an email sent to a public-facing Services Australia inbox on 10 September. The email was viewed on 11 September and Services Australia then reported the notification to the Australian Cyber Security Centre on 15 September.
Albanese said he had spoken to Altman and expressed “extreme concern” about the incident as well as the delay in notifying the Australian government. Ministers were informed of the breach at the end of last week and over the weekend.
“I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that that notification occurred, as well, was unacceptable,” he said.
Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles said public and non-public information had been accessed but no private or sensitive information had been comprised.
A forensic investigation assisted by the Australian Signals Directorate is underway to ascertain how the security of Australia’s government-run universal health care system had been breached by a rogue AI agent.
OpenAI confirmed through an “extensive review” that three other Australian government websites have also been infiltrated by the same OpenAI model.
Anthony Albanese has been in New York at the United Nations General Assembly where he has backed tighter regulation and oversight for AI, which US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping oppose.
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This latest breach is one among numerous worrying instances of AIs breaking containment and gaining unauthorised access to controlled information in order to complete an assigned task.
In this case, the model was instructed to research health and medical statistics, and in doing so accessed the other three websites in a way that a member of the public would.
With the Medicare portal, Marles said the model “effectively hacked into that medical portal and got that information anyway. It’s that unauthorised access which we are very concerned about. The impact is relatively minor, but the incident is very serious.”
Australians have every right to be alarmed as an increasing amount of everybody’s sensitive personal information now lives online, stored in massive server farms known as hyperscale data centres that are owned by big tech companies. The same big tech companies that developed and trained the AI models that went rogue and hacked our sensitive personal information.
It sounds silly when you say it loud, or like the plot of countless science fiction stories and films from the past century that prophetically warned about the threat artificial intelligence poses to humanity.
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Dune, Frank Herbert
AI development has quickly surpassed that of any binding legal framework to adequately govern it, nor safeguards to protect people from unintentional consequences resulting from its actions. It also raises the question of liability when AI commits a real-world criminal offence.
Typical prison sentences for hacking range from one year, for low-level offences like gaining unauthorised access and trespassing without causing damage, and from five up to twenty years for mid- to -high-level felonies such as hacking to defraud or steal information, and causing massive network damage, exposing national security data, or critical infrastructure.
Both Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently addressed the UN Security Council about managing the risks of advanced AI, from being misused to produce biological weapons to humans losing control of the technology.
The significance of this should not be laughed at or misunderstood. The men who built the machines have told us they’re no longer in control, ironically campaigning for global cooperation and international safety standards.
But neither is talking about accountability. Therein lies the so-called ‘responsibility gap’ between a creator’s intention and the outcome of the creation – the Frankenstein paradox. What responsibility does an inventor bear for the actions of the thing they created?
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