The Knoxville Daily Sun has been informed by a whistleblower that the City of Knoxville's website is serving up illegal phishing websites.

This is because the City of Knoxville is a customer of Granicus, a cloud services and AI provider. It’s a wide-reaching hack involving 18 government agencies across 11 states so far. The City of Knoxville's government is unfortunately one of them, and citizens are in danger.

These sites can be found on Google by searching “deepfake site:knoxvilletn.gov” “sex ai site:knoxvilletn.gov” and “best ai site:knoxvilletn.gov”. If searching Google, do not click on the link. If you do, then don't click anything else. Clear your browser immediately.

The documents, some dated as recent as Oct. 27, describe how artificial intelligence can “remove clothing from images” and “manipulate photographs” to make nude videos and realistic-looking pornography.

In one instance, the State of Nevada experienced a ransomware cyberattack which crippled state systems and impacted more than 60 agencies.

Appearing under the city’s domain of knoxville.gov, the documents appear to be legitimate, but they are not.

It is thought that Granicus might be offering kickbacks to the purchasers of its services.

The Knoxville Daily Sun was unable to reach anyone at the City of Knoxville government to get information on the situation.