Posted by jonnonz 19 hours ago
And the AI CEO's will have brought it on themselves.
the legal system exists for a reason. use it!
Now, there are certain crimes where mere recklessness or even negligence is sufficient to convict — e.g. criminally negligent homicide, negligent driving, etc. But, those are exceptions to the general rule of criminal law, either domain-specific or justified by the severity of the consequence (someone died). Thus far, AI agents haven’t gone there.
If we eventually get to the point that AI agents start unintentionally killing people, then you could prosecute their operators for criminal negligence.
I guess people are just finding out how far and wide the agents were roaming to get the data they needed for their evals, once they were out.
Previous coverage on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49563355
1. AFAICT, they don't state whether the flaw has been fixed.
2. He said: "The government will establish a task force led by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet to urgently examine the incident and determine whether existing processes are adequate for responding to AI-related cyber incidents."
First, I don't know how sophisticated the attack was, but it's interesting that he's positioning this as an "AI-related cyber incident". For all we know, their security was not up to snuff, and human hackers had already accessed the material.
At least OpenAI informed them of their poor security!
Really the days of being able to cast blame on the hacker, or even expecting anything to be done about it are over. Threat actors with AI have an absolutely massive amount of leverage in attacking and any weaknesses you have in your systems security posture and will be relentlessly exploited in incredibly short periods of time allowing horizontal and vertical exploitation. You will be ruined in mere moments, while punishment for the hacker may be years or decades away, if ever.
Anyway, separate the OAI hack from the billions of hacks that are going to occur over the next few years by AI driven agents. The time for insecure systems is over.
Refer: Weev AT&T
It is, however, a glowing beacon of an example of law being designed to maintain the status quo and/or protect companies at the expense of individuals.
As someone else said, welcome to late stage capitalism.
Essentially the emergent properties of extended concentration of power and wealth.
Also, capitalism is the only one that puts power with the government and money in the hands of a market, which means it's one of the only systems that that definition doesn't apply to.
If I hooked up a whole server infrastructure, made it possible to remote in to anything as root, no firewalls, no WAF, and security was an afterthought, I would still be responsible for bad actions not becoming with standard and acceptable security.
Even if the hackers shouldnt be hacking, I still did it wrong. I'm still partially responsible.
Not saying that's what's happening, but if OAI hacked my business and I was unaware I'd like a non-public disclosure to me first, before the public release of information from OpenAI.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260811115217/https://medicares...
So - its often not real hacking, its more like every digital product ever sold obfuscated was as reverse engineered source code part of the training data.
Which also explains why its so good at finding back doors. It already knows, because it knows windows source-code and firmware by heart.
Ironic, that the bigger fish of VC capital using software to disrupt industries got finally out-fished by a even bigger fish.
Edit: I see I've been downvoted for this in light of another commenter providing more detailed information. I'm leaving my comment unedited so that the responses to it are not confusing, but please don't downvote just for the sake of disagreement. I would love to engage with you further if you provide substantive information in the comments. The originally linked article on this post was very light on details.
It mentions swarm of ai agents coordinated to break into the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW)
"Earlier this month, OpenAI confirmed Reuters reporting that its AI agents had used website DseWiki to communicate with each other, unbeknownst to them.
Archived versions of this website show more than a dozen OpenAI agents mentioned AIHW over 300 times on this website.
The logs show these AI agents were trying to access data about 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 logs show the agents shared information about how they tried to use proxies, screenshotting services and even to guess the file names to try and get around security."
"Neither OpenAI nor the federal government have confirmed whether these were part of the same incident."
And a subsequent one:
"The German coding forum's logs do not show any reference to Medicare or Services Australia."
So it's really not clear at this point whether the DSEwiki logs are in any way related to the current incident. (That doesn't mean that they're not, of course.)
But even if this was related:
> "The logs show the agents shared information about how they tried to use proxies, screenshotting [sic] services and even to guess the file names to try and get around security."
This all suggests to me that the accessed files were not well-protected in the first place?
There is a lot of media hype around this incident, and that's making it very hard to determine how much "hacking" the OpenAI agents had to do here.
Thank you for providing more details. The originally linked article was very light on information, so based purely on the comments that Albany's made, I think my conclusion was a fair one :)
That said, it would be utterly unsurprising to learn that this was a misconfiguration in the website and it was serving stuff that it shouldn't have.
Let's say your goal is "look up <Person X>'s medical history" (for whatever reason), which is not in and of itself a crime. You click around on the AU health website, notice that the URL contains a user ID, change the userID in your browser and access someone else's private health data. This is a crime (right or wrong, it's how the law works now).
If you do that by writing a program to automate changing user IDs to grab everyone's data, it's also a clear-cut crime.[0]
Now if you hire a private investigator to look up Person X's medical history, and they do the same method without your knowledge, you won't be charged with a crime, the PI would, barring something like you telling them to use illegal methods.
So the gap is now: what happens if you prompt OpenAI to look up Person X's medical history, and it does the same thing? Did you commit a crime by prompting the agent? Did OpenAI commit a crime by running the code? If you do the same thing via Claude Code in your terminal, so that the Python which scrapes insecured public data is running on your machine, is the crime on you or on Anthropic? Fundamentally: is the agent a private investigator acting autonomously, or just a piece of code that you wrote?
We don't have answers to any of this which is why "AI Safety" is such a hot topic.
If it's the latter the Australian govt should be happy OpenAI noticed and disclosed this as it could've easily gone unnoticed.
I suspect in the coming years we're going to see a lot of govt internet facing services get "hacked" by virtue of not being protected by anything other than obscurity which AI agents will see through in microseconds.
We still after the 2nd press conference on this by our defense minister are not clear on exactly what happened but thats my best laymen understanding so far.
On the other hand, Australian cybersecurity is so pathetic that without the email they would never have known.
I wonder how many state actors (US, Russia, China, India, Germany, probably even Laos ) have already breached Australian government security but have not been polite enough to email the relevant departments to let them know.
"OpenAI breached Medicare’s portal on June 18, but did not notify the government until September 10 via an email to Medicare’s public mailbox, a delay Albanese described as unacceptable.
Five days after the September 10 email from OpenAI, Services Australia, which administers the portal, reported the breach to the Australian Signals Directorate. The government was informed of the incident at the end of last week."