OpenAI Agent Breached Medicare Portal, Australian PM Reveals
OpenAI Medicare Data Breach
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal in June, reaching both public and non-public files. He called the incident unacceptable and expressed extreme concern to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, criticizing the company for taking too long to notify the government. The breach follows similar test incidents involving OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google models.
This incident occurred in June this year, and involved an OpenAI agent gaining unauthorised access into the public-facing Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, which is administered by Services Australia.
- Lukas_Skywalker
- Chance-Device
> He said the agent had accessed files that were publicly available as well as material that was not intended for public access.
“Not intended”. I’ll bet you whatever this was it wasn’t even secured, it was just hosted somewhere openly.
- gravelc
The fact the incident occurred in June and OpenAI only notified the Australian government on September 10 is a major issue. Hacking a nation-state's universal healthcare system is about as serious as it gets, yet OpenAI seem quite relaxed about the whole thing (presuming they have known about it for some time).
- simonw
If it was the Australian Medicare Statistics Reporting Service on June 18th it may have been part of this incident: https://collusion.wiki/ - the bulk of that coordinated activity was between 16th and 21st of June, and we know they were hitting UK government data sites.
I had a dig around in the data that they published on that site and found references to www.aihw.gov.au and viz.aihw.gov.au and vizprod.aihw.gov.au
- nxobject
Beyond the breach, I think OAI deserves to answer: what and why did it access the information? Real people and their data are involved.
It looks like the PM gave Sam Altman a "tsk tsk". It will be interesting to see whether someone else tries to impose more consequences.
- bonsai_spool
This feels like a very credible opening to a modern-day Terminator reboot. Sometime over the Christmas-NYE week we will learning that NYSE and other exchanges have been compromised, as well as all public-facing utilities...
- dhx
From the clues provided in the press release and a quick search, I wonder if the culprit website could have been at least associated with https://medicarestatistics.humanservices.gov.au which has seemingly been shutdown/redirected some time after 11 August 2026.[1] Source code of the archived website indicates SAS web application software being used as the backend. However, the press release indicates it wasn't so much a public dashboard website that may have been the issue, rather, it was a website which third parties may have used to report data. The archived website also has a date of last update of 23 October 2025, so despite "Department of Human Services" being replaced by "Services Australia" in May 2019, the website was seemingly still in use 6 years later under the old domain name, with the website itself being updated at some point in history to use "Services Australia" branding. CT logs have a few other domains of potential interest but I couldn't find archived pages, search results, etc indicating whether those domains were ever actually used publicly, or used for statistics reporting purposes as the press release indicates.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260811115217/https://medicares...
- BeetleB
What's notable is:
1. AFAICT, they don't state whether the flaw has been fixed.
2. He said: "The government will establish a task force led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to urgently examine the incident and determine whether existing processes are adequate for responding to AI-related cyber incidents."
First, I don't know how sophisticated the attack was, but it's interesting that he's positioning this as an "AI-related cyber incident". For all we know, their security was not up to snuff, and human hackers had already accessed the material.
At least OpenAI informed them of their poor security!