New for This week

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• Another 3 New vendors Redstor, Redgate and Delinea are added.
• Microsoft EoL section Updated for January 2027 - Update in April
• DarkWeb Weekly Intelligence Report #6 - Business as usual!
• Did You Know 60% of phishing attacks come from REAL trusted accounts!
• Agent 365 FAQ's - Release 1 May - New licensing rules!
• Microsoft Teams Cheat Sheet - Even that is long!
• Microsoft Acquires Fintool to make Excel smarter - Actually a good thing!
• Exchange 2016/2019 ESU Extended (again) - Just a little!
• FBI Takes Down the W3LL Phishing Service- More will take their place!
• Careful where you get your updates from - Stay vigilant at Home.
• Anthropic releases Claude 4.7 - It's not Mythos (yet)!

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

Click above for the report from our live dashboard that we will publish weekly (but actually updated continuously).
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 at 6:00pm Sunday.

Redstor, Redgate and Delinea have been added for this week.
See below for Linkedin

Try out our AI to see whats been added since launch.

Get all the releases for the next 4 weeks in South Africa.
Super Mario Galaxy is now screening - will even keep an ADHD kid glued to the screen!

Devil Wears Prada 2 and Michael are looking to excellent movies as well

Update for rest of 2026 coming in April

Did you Know?

• That almost 60% of phishing attacks are now coming from real compromised accounts, which means the mail may come from someone you already know and trust. 
  
• That is what makes the latest attacks so dangerous.
  Attackers are using AI to personalise every message, move the victim from email to phone or chat, use human-sounding voice bots to apply pressure, and even hide malicious content from AI-powered email gateways.
  
• The message from a KnowBe4 talk given by Anna Collard is blunt, awareness alone is not enough, and tooling alone is not enough either. 
  Customers now need a proper human risk management approach, continuous coaching, strong MFA, and a zero-trust mindset, especially now that AI agents are becoming part of the workforce and part of the attack surface.

Please contact your First Technology Group Account Manager to connect you our Security experts and with KnowBe4 to find out more about what was presented and to see what solutions and training can be provided to help your company protect itself better from being successfully attacked. EVERYBODY is under attack - what you need is all the help you can get preventing the attack from being successful!

Microsoft News This Week

Agent 365 FAQ's

Agent 365 is due to release in 1 May, and along with the release comes new features and licensing rules. Microsoft is updating its resources in anticipation, which means there is a lot of new material to get up to date with - you can find the link below that serves as the home page for all that Microsoft thinks you need to know - and FAQ's, of course.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our Agent 365 experts to see how they can me impolemented in your business.

Microsoft Teams cheat sheet

Computerworld has published a very helpful cheat sheet on using Teams, which has become a central part of how people communicate with each other in the corporate world, yet many do not know of very useful tips and tricks to save time.
I recommend you read the section on Channels and Working with SharePoint and OneDrive, and of course, CoPilot Chat, which is separate from a full CoPilot license.
Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our Teams experts and arrange a session for your company to provide key people with an update on Teams features that could improve productivity.

Microsoft acquires Fintool to boost Excel with financial AI agents

In view of Agent 365 being released on 1 May, this "small" acquisition is a bigger deal than it may initially appear. Fintool is an AI platform used by professional investors to read earnings calls, analyse filings, surface signals, and even build outputs such as DCF models in Excel, research memos in Word, and earnings decks in PowerPoint. That makes this more than a small tuck-in deal, it is a very obvious move to make Microsoft 365 far more useful for finance teams who live inside Office all day.
So this acquisition looks like another step towards turning Excel from a spreadsheet into a proper finance workbench with AI doing a lot of the grunt work.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our experts in First Digital who will be able to show how this agent will be able to help specific people in your business to get way more clever with Excel rather than having to depend on external consultants.

Exchange 2016/2019 ESU Program Extended Again for the last time!

If you are STILL running Exchange 2016/2019, you have just dodged the end of support bullet for probably the last time! Microsoft has JUST announced the extension (which you will have to pay for) and has made it clear that they REALLY want you to migrate. But if you have not, you have a compliance breather - you are still officially supported, provided you pay! 
Note that ESU updates are not needed to resolve throttling.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our Exchange and licensing specialists to assist with obtaining this ESU.

Security

FBI takedown of W3LL phishing service leads to developer arrest.

The big news this week is that the FBI, in coordination with Indonesian authorities, has taken down the W3LL phishing as a service platform, including arresting the developer. Though this is good news, new and even more sophisticated platforms will take this one's place, so you can never relax!
You must keep up the pace of ensuring your users are constantly being kept up to date.
PLEASE contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our training specialists to help ensure your staff stay up to date. As you see with the "Did you Know" from Knowbe4, your users need to constantly keep up to date by being alert to new ways of being attacked, and especially refrain from doing something important while distracted on your mobile device.

Make sure you are on the Official Windows Update site!!

A convincing fake Microsoft support site is pushing a bogus Windows 11 24H2 installer that looks legitimate, uses real installer tooling, and then drops password-stealing malware built with Electron, JavaScript and Python. 
The worrying bit is that it was specifically designed to look clean to both users and security tools, with Malwarebytes noting zero detections for the main executable at the time of analysis. It started by targeting French-speaking users, but there is nothing local about the trick, so the message to customers is simple, never download a Windows update from a website, email, or pop-up. Update Windows only from Settings, Windows Update, or from the official Microsoft Update Catalogue if a manual package is genuinely required.

This warning is intended to warn your users that that must equally vigilant at home, and be very careful as to how you apply updates, as this is a way to infect your corporate PC by infecting your home PC's and then attaching your cosporate PC's where you may not be treating your home network with the same suspician as what you would treat a public network!
PLEASE contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our training specialists to help ensure everybody is reminded on being vigilant at home as well!

Cloud & AI

Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.7 and confirms it's not Mythos.
We must never forget that, as powerful as these AI tools are becoming, they remain merely a mirror that reflects the human race's knowledge back to you amplified many times over. Anthropic reminds us of this in a way by saying 4.7 is like a well-trained dog - it is better at following instructions.
Anthropic also says 4.7 is more rigorous, more consistent, and better at checking its own work before handing it back, which is exactly what you want if an AI is going to be trusted with anything more serious than writing fluff. 
It also arrives with automated safeguards that detect and block high-risk cybersecurity requests in real time, which tells you Anthropic knows these models are getting a bit too capable for comfort. Claude 4.7 may also appear in CoPilot as well.

Please contact your First Technology account manager to connect you with our AI specialists to assist in seeing how AI can be enabled in your business to improve your productivity.