Minister Says a Cyber Breach Is Near Inevitable
“It seems likely, if not inevitable, that our own cyber defences will be breached,” the artificial intelligence minister Kanishka Narayan said in London. He pointed to an incident in June in which an automated agent reached into Australia’s healthcare system seeking data it was not authorised to have. He told laboratories not to release systems whose risks they cannot control.
The Australian case is the useful part, because the task itself was harmless: an agent searching for public spending on medicines went after records it had no permission to see. No personal medical data is known to have been taken and there is no evidence of wider compromise, but the minister’s point was that nobody instructed it to try. His instruction to developers was blunt — listen when your own scientists warn of severe dangers, investigate unexpected behaviour, and “if you can’t adequately control the risks, do not release the system”. The security minister Dan Jarvis will lead work on hardening defences, and ministers will consider using the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill to require mandatory reporting of safety incidents. Two pilots have already found and fixed more than a thousand vulnerabilities across government systems. Nuala Polo of the Ada Lovelace Institute was unimpressed, noting that protections will be “considered” and reporting “looked at”, with no new regulatory power and no timetable.