OpenAI ‘sorry and working to do better’ after hack of Medicare and other Australian government websites

OpenAI has apologised to Australians for its agent attack on Medicare, and will front parliament next week, as the tech company revealed more details about its June hack of Australian government websites.

In a blog post released on Tuesday, OpenAI said it should have handled its response better.

“We also should have handled our response better. We are sorry and working to do better in the future.”

The company also provided more detail on the incident revealed by the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, last week.

OpenAI said it became aware of agent activity on Australian government websites in mid-August after the company reviewed earlier training incidents after the Hugging Face attack in July.

The agents gained non-public access to a Services Australia portal for Medicare statistics, and OpenAI said the agent was able to run commands, retrieve internal files, credentials, and write files, but no patient or client records were accessed.

The NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research’s public crime mapping tool was also accessed, with application configuration, operational jobs and logs, and website metadata provided to the agency.

The agent discovered an exposed access key to query the Victorian agency for health information’s reporting system to access aggregate survey statistics.