Former UN cyber negotiator warns AI agents can easily exploit Australia’s legacy systems

Australia’s former chief UN cyber negotiator has warned Australia’s government and large sections of the economy are easily exploited by AI agents, increasing the risk that sensitive information could be compromised due to ageing systems.

As the government urgently undertakes a forensic investigation into a rogue OpenAI agent accessing Medicare data, the AI expert and Tech Policy Design Institute executive director, Johanna Weaver, said huge vulnerabilities existed across older IT systems.

Weaver, who completed her term at the UN in 2021, said thorough investigation and remediation efforts would be required to close vulnerability gaps, calling on AI companies not to release models they could not control on the internet. She also revealed that the systems aren’t updated and maintained because either people have forgotten about them or it’s too costly, or there aren’t updates for systems any more, which is what these agents are going to be exploiting.

The federal cabinet will discuss the fallout since the latest OpenAI hack into Medicare’s systems, as OpenAI said on Sunday it had paused training of its latest artificial intelligence models amid growing reports of its agents going rogue.

OpenAI said it would resume training “only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards” in place, adding that it expected it would have to “hit pause” again as AI developed and other issues emerged.