JOURNALIST: Could you just clarify, did our security agencies completely miss this breach? We only found out once the company actually told us the breach?
PRIME MINISTER: Well, to be very clear, the way that this occurred was not in a way that would likely – I mean, this is not a security website where there is – this is a Medicare statistics portal.
This seems rather revealing. A pity journalists didn't ask about what protections were bypassed on the data that was obtained.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-24/openai-agents-plotted...
I agree that security was probably awful but the agents did circumvent a block on their access. The definition of “hacking” is fuzzy but this is more nefarious than simple web crawling.
If your house is robbed, does it matter whether you didn't have a state-of-the-art lock? A robbery is still a robbery.
It very much does matter.
If I walked past, saw it and remembered it or even recorded it, is that honestly theft?
A lot of these "hacks" are the equivalent of asking "hey, can I come in?" and the guard assuming that anyone who would ask is authorized, and thus saying "yes". But if the guard said "yes" then it seems a bit absurd to call it trespassing.
>Hey can I come into room 1?
Sure. That's the lobby.
>How about room 101?
Sure. That's where we keep the nuclear launch button. Don't press anything red.
Hacker or pentester.
Nope. There’s just a sign saying “red = launch nukes”.
Or maybe just a red button.
Or maybe just a green button that launches the nukes, without so much as “are you sure?”.
Leave it to private enterprises who can actually secure it.
That link describes a hack of Medibank, which is a private company.
What world are you living in?
is incrementing a url query parameters from 0 -> 1 count as hacking?
If a service has a duty to keep your data secure, then failing that is bad. So yeah, the website should be better and I am as cynical as you are about it.
But working around controls to access other peoples data can lead to prison time for a human. This wasn't a white hat operation. Data was exfiltrated however great or small.
Here we have another instance of "But the AI did it! No one is responsible!".
Which gets tiring. LLM's are a great tool but in every other instance of tool use, using tools comes with responsibilities for their outcomes.
Even if the outcome should be: thanks for letting us know, we'll fix it.
Um... why? OpenAI agents have literally been caught coordinating with each other to effect successful multi-stage attacks on sites using novel zero-day vulnerabilities.
While, sure, it's possible this is just a goof on the part of the victim, that you would be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the LLM seems... weird.
More likely by a big 4 firm who collected fees exceeding AUD 100m