Origin cyber hack scare; house, unit prices tumble; blockbusters revive cinema
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Fear and Greed, business news you can use today. Origin Energy investigates a potential massive cyber breach. Unit prices across the country drop while house prices in the largest cities fall. And blockbuster movies are spurring a revival in cinemas. What? The Reserve Bank says people are more worried about inflation than interest rates or housing. And is AI giant Anthropic in talks with the ABC over access to the national broadcaster's content? It is Thursday, the 23rd of July, 2026. I'm Michael Thompson. And good morning, Sean Aylmer. Good morning, Michael. Sean, the main story this morning, Origin Energy is investigating a potential security breach after an alleged hacker claimed to have accessed the personal details of about 2 million customers.
Now, the company has said that it does not believe the impacted data includes customer credit card or bank details, but the Australian newspaper said that it had been sent a sample of 50 customer records containing information Names, addresses, emails, dates of birth, phone numbers and bill history. The Australian said that a ransom had not yet been demanded.
So Origins notified the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Federal Police of the potential incident. Australian companies have very much become a target for hackers recently. Really starting back in 2022, Optus and Medibank both suffered mass breaches. Last year, there was a breach at Qantas' call centre database, exposing 5.7 million customer records, including names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and emails. An inquiry into that only in the last couple of weeks has come out and said Qantas didn't really do anything wrong. There's certainly been a jump in data breaches. Last year, it was up about 8%, according to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. It's early days here as far as Origin Energy is concerned.
And what they're saying that, you know, like credit card details haven't been updated. leaked that accords with what the Australian is saying, because the information they have is not credit card related, but you know, it's a timely reminder, isn't it? What's going on? Like, don't feel like we get carried away with AI. Cyber hacking is still probably the biggest issue in technology.
Yeah, indeed. And look, it's actually worth a read on the Australian's website of how it all came to be exposed. Just some of the details about how almost low tech, you expect it to be all kind of shrouded in secrecy and all sent via encrypted messages and stuff. And they just received an email from a regular Gmail account. Very polite, very courteous email from the alleged hacker sending these details through. It's just, it is quite fascinating and honestly, quite frightening. Really. And you're right. It's a reminder of the constant threat of cyber hackers and increasingly then the threat that AI can pose to cybersecurity as well when you have AI-enabled hackers. Yesterday, OpenAI said that its advanced artificial intelligence models –
inadvertently hacked a company that hosts AI models and data sets. Inadvertently.
The unprecedented attack on the company called Hugging Face Inc.,
Right.
Hugging Face Inc.
What happened in the alleged Origin Energy cyber breach and who was affected?
triggered new calls for curves on artificial intelligence. Now, OpenAI, so we're talking chat GPT here, said that the models broke into Hugging Face's system during an evaluation of their cyber capabilities. While OpenAI's models were operating in a test environment, they exploited a vulnerability in the software of an unidentified third-party vendor to gain access to the internet and ultimately breach Hugging Face's infrastructure. Which, of course, Michael, leads to the question. Two questions. One, why would you ever name your company Hugging Face? That's the main question. The second question, could this actually occur in a non-testing environment? And the answer is probably yes.
Yeah, I would think so. It's also very hard to take you seriously with that story when you had to say hugging face in pretty much every sentence.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–3:32
2
What happened in the alleged Origin Energy cyber breach and who was affected?
3:32–4:25
3
Which types of customer data did the Australian report say were exposed in the Origin leak?
4:25–6:44
4
How does the Origin incident fit into recent Australian corporate data breach trends?
6:44–14:45
5
Could AI tools create new cybersecurity risks like the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident?
14:45–17:43
Speakers
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