Doubt and division echo throughout Hollywood and Silicon Valley as Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI dispute whether or not OpenAI’s now discontinued Sky voice—which the company launched last September—resembles Johansson’s actual voice.

Rijul Gupta, a synthetic media expert and the CEO of DeepMedia AI—a deepfake detection and AI security company based in San Francisco, California—shared a file exclusively with IT Brew showing no evidence of a voice match between Johansson’s real voice and Sky.

“This evidence suggests that it is very unlikely that OpenAI cloned Scarlett’s voice for use in their Sky voice demo,” he told IT Brew in an email. Deep Media—whose customers include major tech companies and the Department of Defense (DOD)—received a $1.25 million grant from the Air Force Research Laboratory to “integrate its tools” into DOD apps, Tech Brew reported last year.

“It is worth noting that DeepMedia’s Voice Biometric AI algorithms are unique in that they are trained on both real and synthetically generated voice samples, which we believe makes them more robust in use cases involving the comparison between real and GenAI voices such as this,” he wrote.

Read more here.—AF

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

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You know the feeling—your IT team is facing a budget crunch and needs to make hard choices on what to prioritize.

That either-or decision-making isn’t confined to the private sector, F5 Chief Product Officer Kara Sprague told IT Brew. Even the federal government needs to rank needs—and near the top is prevention.

“It’s that kind of preventative piece that I think is really important, because otherwise you end up having this mass of installed technology that is out of date, fundamentally insecure, because it’s not being patched on a regular basis,” Sprague said. “There [are] new vulnerabilities being discovered in new and old technology all the time.”

Watch your back. As RSA Security CEO Rohit Ghai told IT Brew in early May, backdoor hacks on third-party vendors are creating vulnerabilities. Attackers are using an organization’s “alarm system” to escape detection, he said.

Read more here.—EH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

After a rocky start to 2024, the IT and security company Ivanti made its New Year’s resolution in April.

Following a discovery in January of vulnerabilities in Ivanti’s Connect Secure virtual private network (VPN) and Ivanti Policy Secure network access control (NAC) products—weaknesses that ultimately led to CISA emergency directives telling customers to disconnect and patch before returning the devices to service—Jeff Abbott, CEO of Ivanti, wrote an open letter to customers declaring a “new era” emphasizing “secure by design” principles.

The secure by design methodology, in short, puts protection burdens and accountability on the manufacturer instead of the customer.

“We have already begun applying learnings from recent incidents to make immediate improvements to our own engineering and security practices,” Abbott said in the letter.

Abbott spoke with IT Brew about immediate changes—and what they mean for the company’s product developers.

Keep reading here.—BH

Do you work in IT or have information about your IT department you want to share? Email [email protected].

Back it up. Microsoft 365 has many capabilities…but backing up all your data isn’t one of them. Good thing Veeam can help do it for you. Learn the benefits of cloud-based data protection in Veeam’s new e-book, and get all the deets on its backup service in this report.