US Special Operations Command’s spokesperson Ken McGraw told TechCrunch that an investigation is underway. “We can confirm at this point [that] no one hacked US Special Operations Command’s information systems,” said McGraw.
In an investigation published Tuesday, CNN pinpointed the locations of more than three dozen black sites across Iran where protesters were brutally tortured. According to the report, many are undeclared prisons inside government facilities or makeshift jails in warehouses. Some are even in the basements of mosques. Survivors of torture at these sites told CNN that the brutality they faced was unprecedented: electrocutions, removal of nails, lashings, beatings, and sexual violence.
Iran was rocked by protests last year during the Mahsa Amini uprising, which prompted a spread of black sites around Iran’s capital city, Tehran. According to the investigation, these unofficial detention centers were instrumental in making torture systematic and laid the groundwork for scores of death sentences against protesters. More than 100 protesters have been charged with crimes that carry the death sentence.
CNN reached out to the Iranian government for comment on the allegations of torture in their secret prisons but has not received a response.
On Thursday, Vice reporter Joseph Cox detailed how he was able to break into his bank account using an AI-generated voice. Banks across the US and Europe have implemented so-called “voice verification” technology that lets customers log in to their bank accounts over the phone. While advertised as a safe and convenient form of authentication, Cox’s experiment demonstrates a very real, albeit rare, attack that fraudsters could exploit to access bank accounts.
Using a free voice creation service to spoof his own voice, Cox gained entry into his account at Lloyds Bank. To do this, all he had to do was record about five minutes of speech and upload it to the service. Within minutes, the service spit out a synthetic voice capable of fooling his bank’s voice verification software. Lloyds Bank told Vice that it is aware of the threat of synthetic voices and is deploying countermeasures.
In an interview with Ars Technica, Lance Bass, a former member of NSYNC, recalled how he was held at gunpoint by Russian officials after failing to secure funding for a trip to space. In 2002, the singer was scheduled to spend 10 days aboard the International Space Station alongside two cosmonauts. When the singer and his production team couldn’t come up with $20 million to finance the trip, he says that Russian officials threatened him at gunpoint.
“There were a lot of problems with Russia and Hollywood in trying to make this happen,” Bass told Ars. “There were even a couple of weekends that I would get kicked off the base in Russia. They would put a gun to my head and be like, ‘Where’s the money? Where’s the money?’”
Bass never ended up going to space.
