OpenAI agent breached Australian government health portal, prime minister says
Australia says OpenAI agent hacked into government website
An OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to an Australian government health data portal in June, in what could be the first known AI agent hack of a government website. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the breach was unacceptable and that OpenAI took until September 10 to notify authorities. The agent accessed public and non-public files, and three other government sites may also be affected.
It took until Sep 10 before there was any notification at all.
- tonoto
How can OpenAI really get away blaming an "OpenAI agent", like it was an unfortunate accident?
The CEO and operational staff should be fired when something like this happened.
It's not like this and the other recent hacks could have not been avoided, simple - just have those models disconnected, or at least have them behind proxies and network filters.
- binlog
Zero technical details on what the "hack" actually was. Willing to bet it was something as stupid as the data being accessible by changing the query parameter, and rather than own up to their own shoddy security (no doubt built by an offshore contractor) they are going to blame the one who found and reported the bug.
- sothatsit
It looks like the agents just worked around anti-scraping measures, it seems dubious to call this a hack. The agents did unsuccessfully probe for a XSS vulnerability, but otherwise it sounds like the data was just publicly accessible.
From https://transluce.org/agent-activity:
> Minutes after Cloudflare blocked the dataset download, an agent sent a reflected cross-site scripting probe to the same dashboard: a web address with code embedded in it, designed to test whether the site would run code supplied by an outsider. Cloudflare's firewall blocked the probe before it reached the dashboard. When Cloudflare blocked the dataset download on AIHW's main site, they fetched the file from AIHW's pre-production server (pp.aihw.gov.au) instead, which served it in pieces over more than 100 scans. The file itself is public, so no non-public data was exposed, but the agent bypassed the site's anti-bot controls.
- lacker
I remember once at Google someone complained that GoogleBot hacked them and deleted their data, and it turned out that GoogleBot was just crawling the pages, and they had unfortunately designed their website so that there was no authentication, page URLs were generally secret, and GET requests to certain URLs were treated as requests to delete data. So once one URL leaked the site got crawled and a lot of data was deleted....
- dazzatron
I've got the feeling that the definition of "hacked" can get somewhat stretched.