Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

If it was the Australian Medicare Statistics Reporting Service on June 18th it may have been part of this incident: https://collusion.wiki/ - the bulk of that coordinated activity was between 16th and 21st of June, and we know they were hitting UK government data sites.

I had a dig around in the data that they published on that site and found references to www.aihw.gov.au and viz.aihw.gov.au and vizprod.aihw.gov.au

View on HN

https://collusion.wiki/explorer/label/ResearchHelperY

I think you're right. A bunch of aihw.gov.au references from this ResearchHelperY

Reporting says it wrote stuff to the server too, wondering what that is about.

The writes where to get past cloudflare.

ABC have picked up this story now at [1], but ABC are treating it as two separate events, possibly directly connected though:

1. Probing of AIHW's website to try and obtain PBS statistics, as collusion.wiki findings show. The collusion.wiki findings don't indicate anything other than intentionally public data was obtained. Bots appear to be trying to get around Cloudflare geo-blocking implemented on AIHW's public website. I can't think of a reason why geo-blocking may be deemed necessary on that website though?

2. Probing of an outdated Medicare statistics reporting website. (I guess at [2] this could be the recently shut down https://medicarestatistics.humanservices.gov.au or related website that matches timeframes of this story).

I suspect though anything to do with PBS data is more important than Medicare data because of heightened tensions from international pharmaceutical companies that lobby extensively against Australia's public healthcare system and collective purchasing of medication by the federal government.[3] Regardless of whether a course of medication costs AUD$50 or AUD$50k, it's purchased in bulk by the Australian government after negotiating with pharmaceutical companies, and then subsidised down to a maximum of AUD$25 at the time it is sold to a patient at a pharmacy. Perhaps if international pharmaceutical companies had obtained more detailed data on use of each brand of prescription medicines in Australia, they could be advantaged in their price negotiations with the Australian government, or advantaged against their competitors?

Less alarmingly though, perhaps some researcher studying the side effects of a particular medication was just asking an LLM to answer a benign question such as "How often is ACME Inc's FixMeUp medication prescribed in Australia?"

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-24/openai-agents-plotted...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49825084

[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-19/australia-defends-pbs...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com