National News
Medicare portal being hacked by OpenAI according to Albanese
Speaking in New York, Prime Minister Albanese said an OpenAI agent gained unauthorised access to the Medicare statistics reporting service portal administered by Services Australia on June 18.
The AI agent accessed both public and non-public files, but Albanese said it did not appear anyone’s personal Medicare details were accessed.
It is known that OpenAI accessed non-public aggregate health statistics and internal files from an old Australian government website that carried Medicare statistics.
It is also understood an AI crawler, which is an automated program that scans websites and collects information from them, was able to find a security workaround to access the data.
Albanese also said he had a “frank” discussion with OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman, saying the company took three months to notify the government of the breach and, when it did, the notification was in an email sent to the Services Australia public inbox.