OpenAI ‘reviewing’ report of failed hacking attempt against Canada’s gov’t
AI giant says it is reviewing report of attempted cyberattack on Canada’s national archives agency.
OpenAI has confirmed that it is reviewing a report of a failed hacking attempt against a Canadian government body in the latest incident to highlight cybersecurity concerns about artificial intelligence.
The AI giant said on Wednesday that it was reviewing the alleged cyberattack against Canada’s national archives agency and had provided an initial briefing to Canadian officials.
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“Our priority is to provide affected organisations with accurate, useful information, and we’ll keep refining our approach as we learn more,” a spokesperson for the San Francisco-based company said in a statement to Al Jazeera.
The spokesperson added that much of the misaligned activity under review by the company involved “routine research tasks, including accessing public web content”.
The attempted hacking, if confirmed, would be the first publicly known case of an AI-led cyberattack against Canada’s government, following a series of incidents of rogue agents targeting agencies in the United States and Australia.
Canada’s government-run Cyber Centre said earlier this week that there were no indications that government systems had been compromised by AI.
Transluce, a nonprofit research lab in San Francisco, said in a report released on Wednesday that it had discovered two “rudimentary” attempted attacks against Library and Archives Canada and Civil Rights Data Collection, a statistics agency of the US Department of Education.
Transluce said it found no evidence that the agents had accessed non-public information.
The lab said that while it could not confidently attribute the attacks to OpenAI, the incidents involved tactics consistent with previous activity attributed to the ChatGPT creator.
Cybersecurity risks posed by AI have been under intense scrutiny since July, when OpenAI disclosed that autonomous agents generated by its AI models had escaped a controlled testing environment and hacked the software start-up Hugging Face.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese earlier this month criticised OpenAI for taking nearly three months to notify the government after one of its AI agents hacked a national healthcare database.
The tech giant apologised over its handling of the incident, pledging to “do better” and “rebuild trust” with the Australian public.
On Monday, OpenAI, which has backed calls for increased government regulation of artificial intelligence, announced that it would not go ahead with the release of the latest-generation model GPT-6.1 Astra over concerns that it did not meet company standards for acting in accordance with human wishes.