Australia: Rogue AI agents worked together for months to gain access to government health data


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.

Read more…
Source:  ABC News


Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox


Related:

  • University of Western Australia suffers major data breach, staff and students locked out

    August 11, 2025

    One of Australia’s major universities has suffered a data breach, with the password information of thousands of staff and students exposed. The University of WA (UWA) confirmed it was investigating a cybersecurity incident on Saturday night, which involved unauthorised access of password information. Read more… Source:  MSN Ness Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter The latest cyber security ...

  • Australia mandates age verification on major platforms, threatens $50M fines

    July 20, 2025

    Australia is implementing comprehensive internet age verification and ID check requirements as part of a major overhaul of online safety regulation. By December 27, 2025, major platforms including Google and Microsoft must implement age verification checks on their search engines for all logged-in Australian users, facing potential fines of up to AU $50 million per breach ...

  • Australia’s Qantas says cyber criminal contacts one week after data breach

    July 7, 2025

    A cyber criminal has made contact with Australia’s Qantas following a data breach last week that exposed personal information of six million customers, a company spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday. The hacker had targeted a call centre and gained access to a third-party customer service platform containing the customers’ names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates ...

  • Qantas hit by cyber attack, leaving 6 million customer records at risk of data breach

    July 2, 2025

    Qantas is warning a “significant” amount of customer data has likely been stolen from its records during a cyber attack. The airline has released a statement saying that, on Monday, it detected unusual activity on a third-party platform used by a Qantas airline contact centre. The airline said 6 million customers had service records in this ...

  • Melbourne-based financial services and advice firm hit with cyber attack

    May 30, 2025

    Financial services aggregate 3P Corporation has denied its data was breached in an April attack; however, hackers have published more than 200 gigabytes of internal documents and customer data online. The Space Bears ransomware gang listed Victorian financial services firm 3P Corporation as a victim on its darknet leak site in early April, and has since ...

  • BADBAZAAR and MOONSHINE: Spyware targeting Uyghur, Taiwanese and Tibetan groups and civil society actors

    April 9, 2025

    MOONSHINE and BADBAZAAR are examples of trojans; they have malicious functions hidden inside an otherwise functioning app that can be downloaded from app stores or online file-sharing services. These apps are designed to trick a user into downloading and installing them on a device. Once an app is installed, it uses vulnerabilities on the device to ...