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• Another 3 New vendors Grammarly, HeyGen and dBase are added.
• Microsoft EoL section Updated for April 2027 - all about modernisation!
• DarkWeb Weekly Intelligence Report #8 - Business is booming!
• Agent 365 FAQ's update - "Pinky Promise" we are not coming for your job
• A Warning - You are actually going to be paying a license for a non-human? Yep!
• Microsoft Foundry Pricing Guide - It gets really complicated and expensive!
• 32Gig is the new minimum - Best plan for 32 Gig - you'll upgrade to it anyway!
• Phishing made easy- and it will get easier. From 1st Contact to Hacked in minutes!
• Quishing surges - You need to warn EVERYBODY from teenagers to Grandparents.
• 20 Million users of CoPilot!!!??? - So Says MIcrosoft! Time to pay attention!

We scan the DarkWeb continuously for Hacker signals and Ransomware attacks.

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This is part of the DarkWeb monitoring services included with many of BUI's managed services offerings. This report is live, and this is a "snapshot" of the top 10 events as of Sunday Afternoon.

Grammarly, HeyGen and dBase have been added for this week.
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The long awaited Mortal Kombat 2 is now screening in May along with Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mandalorian & Grogu

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Microsoft News This Week

Agent 365 FAQ's updated (again)

Microsoft has updated the Agent 365 FAQs again, just ahead of the 1 May 2026 launch.

The licensing message is getting clearer where for now, Agent 365 is licensed per human user, based on how those users interact with, own, sponsor, or manage agents.

Microsoft has also confirmed that there are no consumption-based costs for Agent 365 at this stage, but it is inevitable sooner rather than later

I would still read the “key principles for understanding Agent 365 licensing” section at towards the end of the FAQ carefully, because this is exactly the sort of thing that can quietly become expensive later if misunderstood.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to help you review how you can be impacted by this announcement and how you can start looking at implementing Microsoft Agent 365 in your business.

You are going to be impacted by Microsoft trying to sell you M365E7, so it will be useful to get ahead!

A warning on what is coming

A Directions on Microsoft Blog by Mary Jo Foley makes it clear that per-user licensing is not going away, but it is no longer the full story.

The direction is now per-user plus usage, and that means customers need to start planning for metered costs across productivity, coding, security, business applications and agents.

GitHub Copilot is already moving to usage-based pricing from 1 June, and Microsoft says many business-app customers are already buying usage-based credits.

Agent 365 may be starting with per-human-user licensing, but it makes complete sense that the move to human/consumption licensing will happen quite soon.

This is the bit to watch.
The Microsoft bill of the future is not just about how many people you have. It is increasingly about what they, and their agents, actually do. That could get interesting, and by interesting, I mean expensive if nobody is watching it properly.
Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our AI experts to ensure that we are helping you prepare for a (near) future where your AI is going to be taking an increasingly bigger slice of your licensing pie, and making sure it is put to effective use is critical.

Microsoft AI Foundry Pricing Guide April 2026

Microsoft has updated the April 2026 Azure AI Foundry Pricing Guide, and this one is worth reading before anyone starts building “just a small AI app” that quietly becomes a finance department horror story - like a teenager with YOUR credit card and no limit!

The useful bit is that it explains the main ways you pay for Azure AI Foundry services, Pay-As-You-Go for variable workloads, Batch deployment for large asynchronous jobs, and Provisioned Throughput Units (PTU’s), when you need predictable performance and capacity.

The practical message is simple, AI pricing is not just “how many tokens did I use”. You also need to understand model choice, deployment type, data residency, performance requirements, Azure AI Search, storage, networking, agent tools and any connected services.

Microsoft’s own documentation makes it clear that deployment type affects billing, data processing location and performance behaviour.
So.......please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our experts in First Digital who will be able to help with the best solution and pricing model for AI foundry implementetion.

Microsoft Says 32GB is the (gaming) Sweet Spot for Windows

This story appears to be addressed to gamers, but don’t be fooled.
This is really a corporate PC story wearing a gaming T-shirt!

A modern business notebook is not just running Windows, Word and Excel anymore. It is running Teams, Outlook, Edge (with far too many tabs), OneDrive, security agents, endpoint protection, DLP, VPN software, device management tools, browser extensions and all the other “little” things that quietly chew memory in the background.

Now, Add AI

Copilot+ PCs already require 16Gig RAM as the official minimum, with a 40 TOPS NPU and 256Gig storage. That is the start, not the optimal state!
As more AI capability moves onto the device, including smarter search, local translation, image tools, background indexing and whatever Microsoft decides to quietly bolt on next month, 16Gig starts looking like enough for a machine that can boot, not a machine that can cope with real work.

This is why 32Gig should now be treated as the real minimum for any serious corporate PC refresh.
Yes, memory prices are painful, and yes, budgets are under pressure. but buying 16Gig machines today may simply mean buying yourself out of tomorrow’s performance complaint in advance.

The old question was “can it run Windows?”
The better question now is “can it run Windows, the corporate stack, and AI without making the user want to throw it out the window?”
AND...... remember the machine you buy today will STILL be running in your business in 2029...... what will the world look like then?

Before you issue your next RFQ, PLEASE contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our hardware specialists to revisit the specification.
For most business users, 32Gig RAM and a proper SSD should be the default conversation, and MUCH bigger, higher resolution monitors - 1920X1080 is not practical for work efficiency anymore....but that is a story for another day.
For developers, analysts, heavy Excel users, creative teams and anyone running local AI tools, you may need to go higher - probably double!

Security

BlueKit Makes Phishing a Breeze for the Bad Guys

This "kit" comes with more than 40 ready-made templates for brands like Outlook, Gmail, iCloud, GitHub, Yahoo, ProtonMail, Ledger and others. 
In other words, the criminal no longer needs to be particularly clever, technical, or even patient. BlueKit gives them a dashboard, templates, domain handling, fake login pages, victim monitoring, Telegram alerts, and even an AI assistant to help draft phishing campaigns.

The AI assistant part is not yet the scariest bit. Researchers say it looks more like a campaign skeleton generator than a fully polished phishing writer.
That will improve. It always does.

The real danger is that BlueKit can track sessions, capture cookies and local browser storage, and monitor what the victim sees after login.
That matters because this is how attackers can get around Multi-Factor Authentication. The user thinks they are logging into a legitimate service, approves the MFA prompt, and the attacker sits in the middle collecting enough session information to get in anyway.

So yes, MFA is still essential, but is no longer your magic force shield.

This is a reminder that humans remain the weakest link because they can be rushed, scared, distracted, flattered, fooled, or simply caught on a bad day. 
PLEASE contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our training specialists to help ensure your staff stay up to date. Increasingly, training needs to be customised for what is relevant to YOUR company, as attackers will increasingly use information that is unique to YOU to get you to believe it is legitimate and trick you that way - generic tick-box compliance training is important but no longer enough.

Quishing surges 146% in Q1 2026 - Microsoft analysis.

Hackers are moving to this method of phishing because defences are handling text-based attempts but are failing on QR-codes, which is driving attackers to embed QR-codes directly in the email and not even sending it as an attachment.
Furthermore, victims are frequently persuaded to open the QR code on their phone, bypassing the corporate security bubble.

As is always the case the employee needs training focused on watching out for these attacks and not to fall for opening a QR code on ANY device under ANY circumstances, and to take the lesson home to their friends and relatives.
PLEASE contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our training specialists to help ensure your staff is empowered with knowledge to NOT be caught out!

Cloud & AI

Microsoft Copilot now has over 20 million paying users


Despite a fairly persistent narrative that "nobody really uses Copilot", Microsoft has confirmed that paid Copilot users have crossed 20 million, and engagement is climbing.
That is a meaningful number to put in front of any company that is still on the fence about whether to invest in Copilot licences.

It also lines up with the agentic Copilot enhancements covered in TOP STORIES #164. The combination of a more capable Copilot, broader inclusion in Modern Work plans, and trending adoption makes CoPilot increasingly competitive

For South African customers, this matters in two ways. First, the agentic capabilities only deliver real productivity if your data, permissions and workflows are properly configured, and 20 million users worth of telemetry is what is now driving Microsoft's roadmap.

Second, the gap between organisations who have rolled Copilot out properly, and those still dabbling with a handful of pilot licences, is starting to widen.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our AI specialists, who can help review and prepare your environment for Copilot is which is now strating to demonstrate that it could be deployed at scale.