#FactCheck-Fake post falsely attributes EVM-related remark to US Secretary Marco Rubio
Executive Summary
A social media post card featuring a photo of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, carrying the logo of Navbharat Times, is being widely circulated online. The post claims that Rubio made a remark criticizing the Indian government, allegedly stating that “those in power through EVMs should tell us what to do and what not to do.” CyberPeace Research Wing research found the claim to be false. There is no evidence of Marco Rubio making any such statement, and the viral post card is fabricated.
Claim:
A post shared by SP leader IP Singh alleged that the US Secretary made comments questioning the legitimacy of the Indian government and EVM-based elections, further linking it to broader political criticism of EVMs.
Post link: https://x.com/IPSinghSp/status/2066740933396492706?s=20, https://archive.ph/submit/?url
Fact Check:
A keyword search of the alleged statement revealed no credible reports or official records of Marco Rubio making any such remark. Additionally, a review of Navbharat Times’ official social media handles did not show any such post card being published, indicating that the viral graphic is not authentic. Further examination of recent statements by Marco Rubio showed no reference to EVMs or the Indian electoral system. Instead, a Navbharat Times report dated June 14 covered a different issue related to tensions in the Hormuz Strait, where Rubio commented on the killing of Indian sailors during a maritime incident and emphasized compliance with US directives for commercial vessels. https://navbharattimes.indiatimes.com/world/america/marco-rubio-remarks-on-killing-of-indian-sailors-in-hormuz-strait-insult-of-india-says
Conclusion:
The research confirms that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not make any statement regarding EVMs or the Indian government. The viral post card is fake and misleading.
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Introduction
Uttar Pradesh's state government has taken significant step to promote e-sports, organised games played on video or digital formats, under its new sports policy. The plan includes setting up an e-sports centre in the state, providing basic infrastructure to athletes in every district, and including them under various beneficiary schemes. Schools and colleges will also be asked to promote e-sports. The government sees e-sports as a crucial tool for connecting with young people and a significant market for businesses, game developers, and sports organisations. An awareness program will be held at high school and college levels to educate children about the benefits of e-sports. A talent search and skill development model will be created by studying the national and international e-sports ecosystem.
Recognition to E-Sports
The Uttar Pradesh cabinet, chaired by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, has approved the New Sports Policy 2023 to promote and foster a sports culture in the state. The policy focuses on various aspects, including physical fitness and training, and supports the development of new institutions and connecting schools, colleges, and private academies with sports. The state government has also incorporated provisions from other states to help athletes chase their goals.
The state's first-ever sports policy, establishing a primary fund of 10 crore for the Uttar Pradesh Sports Development Fund (UPSDF). The policy also inducted e-sports, becoming the first state in India to have e-sports in its official policy. E-sports refers to competitive and organized video game events, and the Centre has officially recognised it.
Key highlights of the Uttar Pradesh Sports Policy 2023
The government's sports department, with the help of the industrial directorate, will plan to promote sports goods manufacturing in the state, with Meerut being one of the main clusters.
The policy also promises to increase the participation of women in sports. Para-athletes will be accommodated in all schemes of the sports department, and special coaches will be appointed for para-sports.
Athletes who have represented the state at national and international levels will be part of the state pension scheme, receiving monthly pensions and preference for university admission and jobs under the sports quota. Cash prizes will be awarded based on international performance and will be increased for those who help these athletes win medals at the top level.
Way forward
The policy promises financial assistance to sports associations and academies, allowing them to expand their infrastructure and training facilities. The state will also establish 14 centres of excellence, each centred around a particular sport, through Public-Private Partnership (PPP) models. The state sports authority will be established, on the lines of the Sports Authority of India (SAI). A State Sports Development Fund will be put in place to provide assistance to weak players, associations, or academies. Five high-performance centres will be built in the state, providing training facilities for high-performance athletes.
The policy also includes provisions for financial assistance to budding athletes, providing health insurance coverage of up to Rs 5 lakh for registered players and funds from the Eklavya Sports Fund for injury treatment. Players will receive training based on their skill power, with three categories: grassroots players, elite-class players, and elite-class players. Other notable aspects of the policy include establishing sports centres in each district, promoting local and indigenous sports, encouraging the sports industry, promoting e-sports, providing better facilities in hostels, forming committees for international players, encouraging schools to start sports nurseries or academies, and forming a committee for the Khelo India University Games which is a largest ever competition held at university level in India.
Conclusion
Uttar Pradesh's New Sports Policy 2023 is a significant step towards sports development, integrating e-sports into its sports promotion strategies. Under Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, the state government is committed to sports infrastructure development, talent identification, and athlete support systems. The policy emphasises inclusivity, accommodating para-athletes, and providing financial assistance, training, and health insurance coverage for athletes. Initiatives include establishing sports centres, promoting indigenous sports, encouraging private investments, and fostering collaboration between educational institutions and sports academies. The policy also encourages for organising and hosting national and international level e-sports competitions in the state. This forward-looking approach aims to harness the full spectrum of sporting opportunities, empowering citizens and elevating its standing in national and international sporting arenas.
References:
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Introduction
Picture a pickup truck moving at around 30 kilometres an hour down a straight country road outside Canberra. A journalist is driving it. Somewhere nearby, a researcher sits with a laptop, and without touching the vehicle, he switches the headlights off while it is still moving, in the dark, turns them back on, activates the wipers at full speed, sprays the windscreen washer, and plays sound through the cabin speakers. That scene, broadcast in September 2026 as part of an ABC Four Corners investigation into connected car security, is the starting point for a conversation that extends well beyond the one vehicle involved. (It was a commissioned cybersecurity demonstration, authorised and arranged by ABC's Four Corners as part of their journalistic investigation titled "Asleep at the Wheel.").
What the test actually found
The vehicle at the centre of the investigation was a BYD Shark 6, a plug-in hybrid pickup, which ABC's Four Corners programme provided to automotive cybersecurity researcher Dan Hreszczuk, co-founder of Canberra based Fortify Labs, for a two week authorised assessment. Hreszczuk later described the access point he found in notably simple terms: it did not require a password at all.
Over the course of the test, Hreszczuk demonstrated remote interaction with the vehicle's headlights, windscreen wipers, door locks, cabin speakers and infotainment display. He also tracked the vehicle's real time location and accessed its cabin microphone, which raised concerns beyond vehicle control and into personal surveillance, since a compromised in car microphone can expose private conversations rather than just dashboard functions. It is worth being precise about what the test did not reach. Hreszczuk said he could not access the brakes or the vehicle's cameras, describing those systems as well protected, and the demonstration did not amount to complete remote control of the vehicle.
Following the broadcast, BYD ran its own internal investigation and confirmed a software defect in the Shark 6's infotainment system. The company's engineers reproduced the access path and traced it to Android Debug Bridge, a standard Android development tool that is meant to be disabled in production vehicles but had been left reachable through the defect, alongside a separate route through the vehicle's CAN bus network. BYD has said it will issue an over the air software update to close the gap. Fortify Labs, for its part, stated its objective had been to simulate the kind of remote access a vehicle manufacturer itself typically holds over a connected car, and to demonstrate how that same level of access could be misused if it fell into the wrong hands.
This context matters because it distinguishes a controlled, authorised research exercise, conducted over two weeks with extended physical access to a single vehicle, from an active criminal compromise. No malware was involved, and no evidence has emerged of this technique being used against vehicles outside the test. The finding is nonetheless significant precisely because it shows what becomes possible once a single weak point in a vehicle's software stack is identified and deliberately explored.
The questions this raises, beyond one vehicle
The useful questions are structural ones. How is authentication actually enforced across every vehicle facing service, not just the ones a manufacturer assumes a researcher might look at? Are a vehicle's internal networks and external facing services properly segmented, so that compromising an infotainment system does not create an unobstructed path toward a vehicle's core control units? Are commands subject to strong authorisation and validation at every layer, rather than relying on obscurity or an assumption that a particular access route would be too obscure to find? Is the principle of least privilege consistently applied, so that a development tool left active in a production vehicle, as appears to have happened here, does not carry the same level of access a factory engineer would have? How are unusual remote behaviours actually detected and investigated in real time, rather than discovered after the fact through an external test? And how are vulnerabilities tracked and patched across a vehicle's entire operational lifecycle, given that a car, unlike a phone, is expected to remain in active use for well over a decade after it leaves the factory floor.
A rulebook already exists. The gap is enforcement, not ignorance
None of this had to be worked out from scratch after the Four Corners broadcast. The industry has had a binding answer to most of these questions sitting on the books since 2021, when the World Forum for Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations adopted UN Regulation No. 155, known in the industry simply as R155. It requires any manufacturer seeking vehicle type approval to run a certified Cybersecurity Management System covering the car's entire life, from the drawing board through production and all the way to the vehicle still being driven a decade later, and to pass a dedicated cybersecurity assessment before that vehicle type can legally go on sale. Since July 2024 the rule has applied not just to new vehicle designs but to every new vehicle rolling off the line, across more than sixty countries that are party to the underlying 1958 UNECE agreement, a list that includes the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and Australia itself.
That last detail is where the picture gets genuinely interesting, and where a simple story stops being quite so simple. Australia sits among the countries that have signed on to the UNECE framework R155 belongs to, yet coverage of the Four Corners investigation reported something that sounds contradictory at first glance: that Australia has no minimum cybersecurity standard actually governing cars sold in the country. Both things can be true at once. Being a party to the 1958 Agreement establishes that a country participates in the broader regulatory architecture; it does not automatically mean every regulation born out of that architecture has been separately adopted into domestic law and is being actively enforced at the point of sale. R155's own companion standard, ISO/SAE 21434, is the detailed engineering playbook manufacturers actually use to meet the regulation's requirements, walking through how to assess threats, design around them, and keep monitoring for new ones long after a vehicle has left the factory. A framework that comprehensive existing on paper is only as useful as a given market's willingness to actually require manufacturers to follow it before a car reaches a driveway, and that gap between a regulation existing globally and a regulation being enforced locally is arguably the more unsettling finding buried inside this story than the hack itself.
The broader lesson
The real takeaway from this test has very little to do with the particular badge on the vehicle involved. It is a demonstration of what happens when any one interface in a complex, connected system is left weaker than the rest of the architecture around it. As vehicles continue absorbing more software, more connectivity and more remote functionality, security boundaries cannot be treated as a feature added once at launch. They need to be designed deliberately, enforced consistently, and monitored continuously across the entire lifecycle of the vehicle and the ecosystem of backend services it depends on, because the cost of getting that wrong is no longer confined to a screen or a server. It now extends to the physical vehicle itself, and the people inside it.
References
- https://www.pakwheels.com/blog/byd-shark-6-hacked-during-cybersecurity-test-in-australia/
- https://securityaffairs.com/199460/hacking/a-byd-shark-6-hack-shows-the-risks-of-connected-cars.html
- https://autotalk.co.nz/byd-confirms-shark-6-software-defect-after-four-corners-hack-ota-fix-coming/
- https://www.carexpert.com.au/car-news/byds-own-shark-6-hacking-investigation-reveals-software-defect
- https://yourlifechoices.com.au/technology/the-connected-car-warning-behind-byds-shark-6-software-fix
- https://arnav.au/2026/09/22/byd-got-hacked-what-really-happened/
- https://pakobserver.net/byd-shark-6-hacked-in-security-test-as-researcher-gains-access-to-car-systems/
- https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/motoring/byd-issue-security-update-shark-6-after-hacking-concerns-1451532.html
- https://finitestate.io/blog/buckle-up-for-security-a-look-at-the-un-r155-regulation-for-connected-vehicles
- https://www.arteris.com/learn/un-r155-2/
Executive Summary:
Several videos claiming to show bizarre, mutated animals with features such as seal's body and cow's head have gone viral on social media. Upon thorough investigation, these claims were debunked and found to be false. No credible source of such creatures was found and closer examination revealed anomalies typical of AI-generated content, such as unnatural leg movements, unnatural head movements and joined shoes of spectators. AI material detectors confirmed the artificial nature of these videos. Further, digital creators were found posting similar fabricated videos. Thus, these viral videos are conclusively identified as AI-generated and not real depictions of mutated animals.
Claims:
Viral videos show sea creatures with the head of a cow and the head of a Tiger.
Fact Check:
On receiving several videos of bizarre mutated animals, we searched for credible sources that have been covered in the news but found none. We then thoroughly watched the video and found certain anomalies that are generally seen in AI manipulated images.
Taking a cue from this, we checked all the videos in the AI video detection tool named TrueMedia, The detection tool found the audio of the video to be AI-generated. We divided the video into keyframes, the detection found the depicting image to be AI-generated.
In the same way, we investigated the second video. We analyzed the video and then divided the video into keyframes and analyzed it with an AI-Detection tool named True Media.
It was found to be suspicious and so we analyzed the frame of the video.
The detection tool found it to be AI-generated, so we are certain with the fact that the video is AI manipulated. We analyzed the final third video and found it to be suspicious by the detection tool.
The detection tool found the frame of the video to be A.I. manipulated from which it is certain that the video is A.I. manipulated. Hence, the claim made in all the 3 videos is misleading and fake.
Conclusion:
The viral videos claiming to show mutated animals with features like seal's body and cow's head are AI-generated and not real. A thorough investigation by the CyberPeace Research Team found multiple anomalies in AI-generated content and AI-content detectors confirmed the manipulation of A.I. fabrication. Therefore, the claims made in these videos are false.
- Claim: Viral videos show sea creatures with the head of a cow, the head of a Tiger, head of a bull.
- Claimed on: YouTube
- Fact Check: Fake & Misleading
