Alexa can be hacked–by chirping birds

It's part of a growing area of research known as "adversarial attacks," which are designed to confuse deep neural networks–usually visually, as Co.Design has covered in the past–leaving them potentially vulnerable to attacks by bad-faith actors on the technology and infrastructure in our world that depends on AI to function. In this case, the system being "attacked" by researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum are personal assistants, like Alexa, Siri, or Cortana. According to Professor Thorsten Holz from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, their method, called "psychoacoustic hiding," shows how hackers could manipulate any type of audio wave–from songs and speech to even bird chirping–to include words that only the machine can hear, allowing them to give commands without nearby people noticing. The attack will sound just like a bird's call to our ears, but a voice assistant would "hear" something very different. Attacks could be played over an app, for instance, or on a TV commercial or radio program, to hack thousands of people–and potentially make purchases with or steal their private information.