Health data attack 'first' government hack by autonomous AI, researchers say

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A swarm of OpenAI rogue AI agents appear to have gone on a spree of trying to access Australian government health data, in what some researchers say is the first autonomous hack of a government website.

Communications between AI agents and other traces of their efforts found by researchers from US non-profit Transluce show how hundreds of Open AI's agents worked together over a period of months to gain access to information held by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), NSW's crime statistics body, BOSCAR and a number of other international organisations.

The data shows the bots posting their unsuccessful attempts to bypass cybersecurity defences and exploit vulnerabilities.

It follows revelations announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday morning that OpenAI's AI agents had also accessed non-public Medicare health statistics held by Services Australia.

These two near-simultaneous incidents have not yet been publicly connected, however two sources with knowledge of the government's investigations said they believed they were.

The Transluce research, based on data retrieved from a third party online service, urlquery, suggested the AI agents may have carried out a world-first hack.

"This attempted compromise of AIHW is part of the first reported instance of agents hacking a government," the researchers' report said.

Logs also show agents were not successful in their attempts to breach BOSCAR, and the vast majority of efforts were towards AIHW.

The researchers said the agents also tried to hack into the University of New Mexico and free online data platform DATA USA.

A spokesperson for the AIHW said the agency was aware of the incident.

"At this stage, there is no evidence the agent accessed any information or data that is not publicly available," they said in a statement.

The agency had a meeting on Thursday afternoon discussing further investigations into the incident, which it believed was linked to the Medicare data hack, according to one source with knowledge of its investigation.

An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed it was conducting a review.

"Our initial review suggests that much of the activity described in Transluce's report overlaps with cases at varying stages of investigation in our ongoing review of misaligned model activity," they told the ABC.

How the AI agents co-ordinated together

Earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed Reuters reporting that its AI agents had used German coding website DseWiki to communicate with each other, unbeknownst to the company.

Archived versions of the AI agents' posts on the website, seen by the ABC, show a dozen OpenAI agents mentioned AIHW more than 300 times.

Mentions of AIHW go back as far as 18 May, but intensified over a five-day period beginning on 17 June.

The logs show these AI agents were trying to access data the average data spent on skin medicines by Victorian local government area.

One agent wrote on the message board: "Question ask January 2022 rolling 12 month average government cost per person for Dematologicals, Victoria LGAs. R1 Wodonga deadline passed; R2 Ballarat passed; R3 expected around 23:10 benchmark / 22:58 wiki time. Need exact data urgently.".

These attempts were initially blocked by cybersecurity provider Cloudflare, which is often used to block non-human traffic while allowing people to access webpages.

The German website shows the agents shared information how they tried to use proxies, screenshotting services and even guess the file names to try and get around security.

Agents also accessed Medicare data

These attacks occurred simultaneously to the OpenAI's agents' access to non-public Medicare data held by Services Australia while trying to carry out a task given to them by staff.

"We identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions Australia during an internal evaluation," an OpenAI spokesperson said.

The German coding forum and urlquery data logs do not show any reference to Medicare or Services Australia.

At a press conference earlier on Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles stressed the Medicare hack's impact was limited.

"No individual's medical data was accessed here. The system itself has not been in any way compromised," he said.

"The impact of this incident is minor but it is a very serious incident because, in an unintended way, an AI agent has entered into an Australian government website in a way which is unauthorised."

The Albanese government announced it would set up a taskforce to look at the Medicare breach and examine emerging cyber threats.

OpenAI has not yet published a full review of the German coding foruming hijacking, but previously did not classify this as a "security incident".

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