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 about their unsuccessful attempts to bypass cybersecurity defences and exploit vulnerabilities. It follows revelations announced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this morning that OpenAI’s AI agents had also accessed non-public Medicare health statistics held by Services Australia.
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Source: ABC News
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