A Consumer Reports investigation found that safeguards on AI voice-cloning software used to ward off malicious actors are as secure as a house of cards.

During its study, the independent nonprofit member organization found that four (ElevenLabs, Speechify, PlayHT, and Lovo) out of the six tools it used to clone existing audio of a Consumer Reports employee required it only to check a box to confirm it had the legal rights to clone the voice, “or make a similar self-attestation,” to proceed.

The remaining two tools, Descript and Resemble AI, had slightly better guardrails, but weren’t unfailing either. Descript’s voice-cloning tool required the investigators to read and record a consent statement in order to create cloned audio; Consumer Reports noted that this could easily be bypassed by using a different tool to generate a cloned statement.

Resemble AI, on the other hand, required investigators to use audio recorded in real time to produce their first voice clone, but they were able to bypass this by playing a recording of the employees’ voice instead. The investigators noted that this method, however, did not produce a “compelling” impersonation.

Voice actors. Malicious actors have wasted no time in leveraging AI voice cloning as a new way to target victims. A 2023 McAfee global study that surveyed 7,000 people found that 25% had either experienced or knew someone who had been a victim of an AI voice-cloning scam.

Read the rest here.—BM

Like the spaghetti dish you finally got around to making, AI chips might be better when they’re homemade.

Two anonymous sources told Reuters last week that Meta is testing out an in-house chip for training AI models—another investment from a company that’s betting we’ll all find a reason to use artificial intelligence.

“If you know that a workload is here to stay, then it really opens the door for incurring some of the large costs and some of the engineering efforts required to build a chip for that workload,” Benjamin Lee, professor in the department of computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, told IT Brew.

Interest in GenAI from the enterprise market dipped in 2024, according to a recent Deloitte survey—in Q4, 59% of global C-suite and executive leaders and 46% of board members had high or very high interest in the technology. In Q1, those enthusiasm numbers were 74% and 62%, respectively.

“We don’t know what the killer app is for generative AI. We don’t know what will suddenly trigger broad, widespread adoption of this workload, but they want to be ready,” Lee said of Meta.

Spending spree. In January 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to invest up to $65 billion as the company expands GenAI efforts, including a planned Manhattan-sized data center and a reported standalone app.

Read more here.—BH

A database containing thousands of healthcare related records was left open to the internet, a researcher found.

Staffing agency app ESHYFT, which provides professionals with a mobile platform on which to connect to long-term care centers for per diem work, had a 108.8 GB, 86,341 record database publicly exposed and free of password protection for an unknown amount of time before Cybersecurity Researcher Jeremiah Fowler discovered it.

Red alert. Fowler, reporting on the breach on Website Planet, said that he alerted ESHYFT of the breach and that it was closed “over a month later.” Fowler added that he did not download any of the data and that there was no sign that anyone had accessed the information.

Fowler reported that in a limited sampling of the data, he found medical documents, Social Security cards, profile and facial images, and various other examples of PII.

“One single spreadsheet document contained 800,000+ entries that detailed the nurse’s internal IDs, facility name, time and date of shifts, hours worked, and more,” Fowler wrote.

Travel time. ESHYFT is available in 27 states. While the demand for traveling nursing is no longer at the peak it was during the pandemic, the traveling nursing market dropped 40% in 2023 from 2022. Akin Demehin, the American Hospital Association’s senior director of quality and patient safety policy, noted last year that full-time work is becoming more of a priority to healthcare centers.

Keep reading here.—EH

Ready to level up your data protection game? Join us on March 27 for a insightful conversation with cloud expert Forrest Brazeal and Rubrik's Joe Hladik. Get the latest on safeguarding your data in a multi-cloud world—without the boring tech jargon! Don’t miss out!