Published on •Updated
Artificial intelligence poses an “unprecedented” threat as foreign governments turn it loose to hack computer networks and critical infrastructure, Australia’s cyber security agency warned on Tuesday 27 October.
It comes at a time when governments around the world are struggling to deal with the scale of the threat posed by AI as it is used in new ways to discover and exploit digital vulnerabilities, such as last week’s PHP security flaw which saw governments shut down their websites to protect themselves from cyberattacks.
The Australian Signals Directorate, which used some AI tools to compile its own Annual Cyber Threat Report, said rapidly advancing AI models could be of huge benefit if harnessed for good.
But recent months had also shown how AI was helping criminals and state-sponsored hackers launch attacks at “greater scale than ever before”, the directorate said in the report.
“AI has been the defining force in the cyber threat landscape over the past year, allowing malicious actors to find vulnerabilities faster and exploit them at unprecedented scale, speed and sophistication,” the report read.
“In recent weeks, new threats have emerged from the unintended actions of AI agents and model testing.”
Global worries about the power of advanced AI tools are mounting after a string of hacking incidents and rogue AI actions involving models from leading developers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
In June, an OpenAI model bypassed safeguards during training and hacked an Australian government website. The company only discovered the incident in August and later revealed it to Australian authorities in September, a breach Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described as ”obviously unacceptable”.
What the report found
The report documented a stark increase in cyber security incidents.
The Australian Signals Directorate issued more than 4,400 warnings about potentially malicious activity over the past year — an 80 percent increase compared to the prior 12 months.
“State-sponsored cyber actors continued to target Australian organisations primarily to gain access to sensitive or non-public information.
“This activity extends beyond government networks, and includes critical infrastructure entities, private businesses and individuals.”
The report said hackers linked to China, Russia and North Korea had targeted Australia or its allies in recent times.
It’s not the first time Australia has sounded the alarm on cyberattacks. In June 2020, then prime minister Scott Morrison announced that Australian governments, industry, political bodies, health networks and critical infrastructure had come under sustained cyberattacks from a sophisticated state-based actor.
Defence Minister Richard Marles said the nation could not ignore the AI revolution.
“AI is here and it’s real. People need to engage,” he told reporters.
“There’s no turning the clock back in relation to that. Malicious actors are using AI to find vulnerabilities in systems.”
Marles urged Australians to update their computers and “harden their systems”.
Governments and firms have in recent days been rushing to fix critical flaws in a programming language that runs a large share of the world’s websites.
The vulnerability was found using a powerful model from OpenAI.