Source : the age
One Nation chief of staff Chris Taylor has questioned whether more regulation was the answer to artificial intelligence hacks.
“It looks like government’s not very prepared for this type of of cyber attack and the new risks that exist, particularly with these type of frontier models,” he told News24.
“What we should be asking is what is the best way for us to be prepared against these type of cyber attacks. I mean, AI is a tool… it’s going to be an arms race, effectively, of whether or not you have the AI tools and access to the AI tools to defend against these type of AI attacks.”
Taylor also questioned the delay in announcing the hack.
“The timing is pretty peculiar, right around the time the prime minister is standing up on a global stage to talk about the perils of AI,” he said. “And yet when, from what I understand, there’s no personal information that’s been released as part of this data breach,” he said.
Australia’s unemployment rate has climbed to its highest level since the disruptions of the COVID pandemic.
The national unemployment rate hit 4.6 per cent in August, the worst result in almost five years.
However, the uptick in the jobless rate is unlikely to stop the Reserve Bank from raising interest rates at its monetary policy board meeting next week.
Earlier this week RBA governor Michele Bullock said an unemployment rate “between 4.5 and 5” per cent would probably be needed to ease inflationary pressures.
Almost 40,000 jobs were added in August but a rise in the rate of workforce participation meant the unemployment rate also increased.
Victoria had the highest unemployment among the states last month at 5.2 per cent, while NSW had the lowest rate of 4.3 per cent.
Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has demanded the prime minister obtain the best artificial intelligence models to bolster the nation’s cyber defences following the OpenAI Medicare hack.
“He needs to get an arrangement in place [with] leading frontier companies to make sure we are identifying vulnerabilities in our critical systems as early as possible to patch those vulnerabilities,” Taylor said at a press conference.
“It’s an obvious thing to do. I’ve been calling on that for many months. And this prime minister and this government is asleep at the wheel.”
Marles has ended his press conference by seeking to assure Australians that the nation’s most sensitive data is kept well secure and that the right investigators are looking into the OpenAI breach.
“I would really want to reassure Australians that, in terms of the sensitive information that the government has about Australian citizens, but also our most sensitive national security information, that sits in a very secure domain, in a context where it is receiving constant attention and probing, and it has maintained that security through until this day,” Marles said.
“We’re not sanguine about that … We seek to learn everything we can from this incident. We seek to be constantly improving in an emerging environment, but we are amongst the world’s leaders in relation to the way in which we manage cybersecurity and particularly of government systems, but also critical infrastructure within the private sector,” the minister said.
“[The Australian Signals Directorate]leads that work, and Australians should take a great deal of confidence from that.”
Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles has defended the speed of the government’s response to the OpenAI breach of the Medicare website, saying an investigation and announcement happened within a fortnight of the government becoming aware.
“If we take a step back, an email goes to effectively a public email address within Services Australia, and 14 days later we are standing before you. And in that period of time, this has been escalated through the Australian government to the highest level,” Marles said.
“Now there is a lot of information which comes into inboxes. There’s a lot of assessment that needs to be done in terms of understanding exactly what is it in an emerging context that is being spoken of here,” he said.
“There is consequence, and this is an important point, there is consequence in terms of us speaking publicly about this, but it is important for us to speak publicly in terms of in terms of public transparency in being able to stand before the Australian people right now, and to do so with a sense of confidence-not complete knowledge, but with a sense of confidence-that the impact of this particular incident was minor, albeit it is a serious incident-is really important,” Marles said.
“We needed to make sure that we could stand here with confidence to give that assurance to have gone public without all the facts at hand, or without that level of confidence would I think have been reckless, and so we are trying to have a balance here of getting this information into the public domain as quickly as possible, and it has all happened within two weeks.”
The Services Australia email account OpenAI used to notify the government of the Medicare breach is monitored on a daily basis, Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher said, despite the email taking five days to be escalated.
“We have someone who goes and has a look through. It gets sometimes quite a number of notifications. Sometimes many of them are hoaxes. So the answer I’ve been provided by Services Australia is that they checked it on the 11th,” Gallagher said. The email was sent on Thursday, September 10.
“So they received the information on the 11th. I think there was a weekend in there as well, and through their own systems and checking, including going back and having a look at their technical data, it was it took a couple of days to verify that what they’d been alerted to in the email was legitimate, and it was at that point that they engaged [the Australian Signals Directorate].”
Richard Marles has backed AI as a “transformational technology” while he argues the government’s concern with the Medicare breach announced today was the claim that the AI model was not instructed to breach the website’s security.
“AI is an incredible technology. It may be the most transformational technology that any of us here live through. It obviously affords enormous benefits for humanity, but it is so important that it is developed in the context of secure measures and guardrails,” the acting prime minister told a Sydney press conference.
“Which is to say that all of these companies are developing guardrails and security measures, and they’re putting a lot of attention to that. That work must lead the development of the capability itself, so that when the capability is developed, it is happening within a secure border. Now we’ve seen incidents over the last few months where that has not occurred.”
Marles said the AI agent “scaled the fence” of the website without being directed to do so, and that was the government’s main concern with the action.
Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles has confirmed that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did not inform him of the Medicare breach when the pair met earlier this month.
“I don’t know the specifics of what Sam Altman knew at that moment in time, and I think we do need to acknowledge there’s a lot of technicalities here in terms of the information at hand,” Marles said.
“I think the best way to answer that question is the way in which I’ve answered it previously. What we would expect is that the government be notified in the most timely manner possible, and we have expressed our displeasure that that did not occur in this instance.”
The pair met in San Francisco in the first week of September, just days before Services Australia was notified of the breach, but after OpenAI became aware.
Marles said the government informed the public of the breach as soon as possible, despite claims from Opposition Leader Angus Taylor casting doubt on the timing which coincided with Anthony Albanese addressing AI at the United Nations.
“In terms of our actions, we have wanted to very carefully understand the information that we have at hand here. Making this public has its own consequences. We needed to do it with a certain amount of information at hand in making this public. And to be clear, the investigations are still ongoing. So we don’t know everything yet in relation to this, and that’s part of the taskforce and the work that we continue to do,” the acting prime minister said.
“We really wanted to firstly assure ourselves that the impact of the specific incident was, as I have said, relatively minor, and we do want to be able to reassure Australians about that, but the incident itself is obviously very serious. It’s very serious that we’ve got an AI agent having gained unauthorised access into an Australian website,” he said.
“Now, the moment that we felt that we were in a position to have that information at hand and to responsibly inform the Australian public, we have in the course of you know last night and today, so that’s our actions.”
Marles said the government was engaging with AI platforms to ensure breaches could be raised “as quickly as possible”.
Government Services Minister Katy Gallagher and Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles have provided additional information on the timeline of the Medicare breach announced today.
The breach took place on June 18, and OpenAI became aware in August of the incursion into the Medicare portal in question. After an internal investigation, Services Australia was informed on September 10, but the email was not addressed by the government body until September 15.
Gallagher said: “Once Services Australia had analysed the information in the email and made some checks they notified the incident to [the Australian Signals Directorate]. Following that, I was advised around the 17th of September and undertook and sought further information from the initial information”.
Gallagher then spoke with Marles, Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, Services Australia, and the Australian Signals Directorate. The minister said those conversations represented “quite a lot of work over the weekend”.
