It’s hard to believe it has been 47 years since Bowers & Wilkins first released their iconic 800 series loudspeakers with the original 801 in 1979. The speakers developed such a reputation for precise, natural sound virtually overnight that Abbey Road Studios brought a pair in to serve as their studio monitors while recording and mixing classic albums by The Beatles and Pink Floyd and legendary soundtracks like John Williams’ “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” (Brief aside, you haven’t heard the “Raiders” soundtrack until you’ve heard it on a pair of B&W 801 speakers).

Today, at the High End HiFi show in Vienna, the legend continues with the unveiling of seven new models in the brand new Diamond D5 version of the 800 series loudspeakers. Price for the new models start at $15,000 USD/pair for the 805 D5 stand-mount (bookshelf) speakers up to $65,000/pair for the flagship 801 D5 towers. The price for the flagship is certainly a bit higher than what the “Series 80, Model 801” sold for in 1979 ($2,850/pair) – even when adjusted for inflation – but 40 years of good old-fashioned British sonic research and engineering has brought these speakers to their highest levels of both performance and industrial design.

The company unveiled a full suite of D5 800 series speakers at the show, not only for two channel music listening, but also for home theater implementations with dedicated center channel speakers that provide a perfect tonal match to other speakers in the line. Whether you’re upgrading a classic two-channel HiFi system or building out a custom home cinema, there’s an 800 series D5 speaker (or twelve) for you, as long as your financial situation can accommodate the hefty price tags.

The Diamond D5 line-up is the fifth generation of the 800 series loudspeakers to use the company’s diamond dome tweeter which is primarily responsible for the speaker’s open airiness, realistic sound staging and sonic transparency. The company says the new 800 Series Diamond D5 range introduces “extensive acoustic, mechanical, and electrical improvements aimed at taking the already category-defining performance of the outgoing range to all-new heights.”

Most of the enhancements have been inspired directly by the company’s highest performance “Signature Series” D4 loudspeakers. And most of the tweaks are designed to further reduce unwanted cabinet resonance and vibrations. Some of these refinements and technology highlights include:

• Space Frame Bracing
• New Plinth with Tuned-Mass Damping
• Improved All-New Aluminum Top Plate
• Enhanced Matrix Internal Bracing
• New Aluminium Mid-range Enclosure (804 D5)
• Signature specification grille mesh and drive unit motor systems
• Upgraded wiring harnesses and crossovers
• All Aluminum crossover mounting plate

More details on each of these enhancements can be found on the Bowers & Wilkins web site.

In addition to the sonic refinements, the Diamond D5 line-up features an new luxurious and lustrous aesthetic with four new finishes: Stealth Black, Warm White, Light Walnut and Dark Walnut.

The Reference Loudspeaker for Denon and Marantz

The Bowers & Wilkins 800 series speakers aren’t just featured in recording studios, and in the homes of well-heeled audiophiles and music lovers worldwide, they’re also used as reference speakers by sister companies Denon and Marantz. Every time a new Denon or Marantz A/V product is being developed, the company’s “sound masters” do extensive listening sessions at the company’s headquarters in Japan to evaluate the performance each piece of new gear. And the final approval from each soundmaster is only given after listening to each on Bowers and Wilson flagship 800 series speakers.

At a recent visit to these offices, we got to see (and hear) so many demos of the previous generation 801 D4 speakers playing vinyl and hi-res audio music tracks with top notch Denon and Marantz amps and receivers that we were trying to figure out how to sneak a pair out and hide it in with our carry-on luggage (but alas, they were too big for that).

Full Lineup and Pricing of Bowers & Wilkins 800 Series D5 Speakers:

• 801 D5 | £43,000 / $65,000 / €50,000 per pair
  The new no-holds-barred flagship three-way tower loudspeaker from Bowers & Wilkins.
• 802 D5 | £32,500 / $45,000 / €37,000 per pair
  Smaller version of the 801, but with the same cabinet proportions as the flagship for a slightly more compact and more affordable option with minimal compromises.
• 803 D5 | £25,500 / $35,000 / €30,000 per pair
  An even more compact “headed” three-way loudspeaker design with both the midrange and tweeter separated from the main bass cabinet for optimal isolation in a smaller overall footprint than the larger tower speakers.
• 804 D5 | £16,000 / $25,000 / €18,000 per pair
  The company’s most compact (and most affordable) three-way floor-standing tower in the Diamond D5 line-up.
• 805 D5 | £10,000 / $15,000 / €12,000 per pair
  The two-way 805 D5 stand-mount loudspeaker is ideal for smaller spaces or for more compact home theater systems that use powered subwoofers for low frequency response and effects.
• HTM81 D5 | £10,000 / $15,000 / €12,000 each
  A high performance three-way center channel for use with 801 and 802 D5.
• HTM82 D5 | £8,000 / $12,000 / €10,000 each
  A slightly more compact three-way center channel for use with 803 and 804 D5.
• FS-805 D5 | £1,600 / $2,000 / €1,800/p
  High-performance speaker stand, for use with 805 D5.
• FS-HTM D5 | £1,100 / $1,500 / €1,300 each
  Center-channel speaker stand for use with HTM81 D5 or HTM82 D5 for ideal speaker height.

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I’d just finished off several waves of fighter planes and attack helicopters headed for the last port still under the control of my desperate nation, keeping our feeble chances alive for one more day. I returned to our base, an aging aircraft carrier, to chat with the corporate bigwig who’d thrown in with our ragtag remainders. He pulled out his smartphone and showed me how he was manipulating photos to make it look like we had more fighter jets than the few we possessed, projecting strength through misinformation.

Strangereal is getting a dose of 2026’s reality.

As the first Ace Combat game in seven years, and the first on this generation of consoles, Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has a lot of technical and story modernizations. At a preview in Los Angeles, I played several hours of the game across six different missions. Rest assured: It wholly embodies the franchise’s particular flavor of tense aerial combat without the severe complexity of ultrarealistic flight simulators. 

It’s also undeniably set in the Ace Combat world of Strangereal, a fictional setting of vaguely European-styled nations embattled in generational wars fought with real-world planes… as well as massive flying wings and land battleships that wouldn’t look out of place in an anime. Yet in my time with the game, it’s what the developers at Project Aces — Bandai Namco’s internal team behind the Ace Combat series — pulled from our real-world 2026 that stuck with me.

It’s integral to Project Aces’ framing for Ace Combat 8, which focuses on relationships between pilots and people close to the player. The game opens up with an unnamed player character being rescued from the sea and taken aboard an aircraft carrier carrying the last military resistance of the Federation of Central Usea, or FCU, following its defeat by the Republic of Sotoa. Before long, the player takes on the role of the titular Wings of Theve, a heroic pilot whose identity is obscured so that when one is shot down, another takes their place. 

Taking on the mantle to preserve the myth is an old storytelling theme, but it takes on new life in Ace Combat 8. Project Aces wanted to bring the lens down from the skies to a more personal level, connecting players with the people they’re flying alongside and protecting aboard the ship. But the breaks between missions, when players bond with these fictional characters, also show them shooting smartphone videos of the Wings of Theve that are sent far and wide as promotional footage. As intentionally surreal as Strangereal is — an abstraction built to stage colossal wars and geopolitical upheaval — it’s still a little bizarre to see real-world smartphone propaganda used to win hearts and minds bleed into a franchise centered on fighter jet dogfights.

As CNET’s supervising editor of mobile coverage, it’s surreal to see social media warfare make its way into a military sim. But when the media sat down with Kazutoki Kono, the Ace Combat series brand director, at the preview, and I asked him about the inclusion of smartphone propaganda, Kono said he sees it as an extension of the player’s journey toward becoming an ace pilot.

“Obviously, there’s massive boss fights, different encounters, super challenging situations that you’ll have to deal with in dogfight situations, perhaps other ace pilots that are your rivals,” Kono said. “But on a much larger scale, I think social media and misinformation is another challenge that teams have to overcome nowadays. You could say that social media is just one among a wide range of challenges that needs to be overcome so the player feels that sense of growth.”

It’s a very specific choice considering which elements of our 2026 reality Project Aces didn’t include — such as drones, which have become more and more a part of modern warfare. I first spoke with Kono back in December after Ace Combat 8 was revealed at the Game Awards 2025. He shared that the unmanned aerial vehicle drone enemies included in Ace Combat 7 were disliked by fans; they wanted the man-on-man dogfight experience with radio chatter and human tension.

“There is always going to be this reality line that we’re going to want to aim for. That being said, we still can’t go for that line at the expense of the player experience,” Kono said in December. “For the player to have fun is always going to be a priority for us as a game design philosophy.”

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Playing Ace Combat 8: Becoming the wings of legend

I was thinking about this push and pull between reality and fiction as I sat down at my station for the preview. Kono’s comments about eschewing real-world elements such as the rise of UAV aircraft made me wonder how much of Ace Combat 8 would be geared toward preserving the dogfighting fantasy evoked in popular media such as Top Gun, even as modern air combat continues to veer toward drones and beyond-visual-range engagements.

Indeed, after my player character was rescued and met the crew, he was sent into the air in the backseat behind the current Wings of Theve, whose aviator sunglasses and charming smile looked uncannily like those of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell in Top Gun. In another nod to misinformation, the pilot, Cope, has had his record of enemy kills greatly exaggerated. When an enemy ace shot our plane down, Cope’s untimely death paves the way for the player to take his mantle — though he sticks around as a ghostly presence to guide you going forward. It’s a fun bit of torch-passing flavor that also provides context, as the player character is a classic wordless protagonist.

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After that prologue, the first mission has the player character taking on the mantle of the Wings of Theve as a publicity move to keep morale up. The second and third missions bring me together with my squadmates — former community college academic The Professor, taciturn Noise and former stunt pilot Tasha (whose colorful hair wouldn’t look out of place on a K-pop idol).

In-game, you can command them to focus fire on targets, choose their own or form up on you. It’s a nice bit of flexibility to suit your play style, though I often lost track of what they were doing while I focused on my mission objectives. Mostly, I enjoyed the radio chatter as they ribbed one another.

You can also kit them out with different aircraft and missile or bomb loadouts tailored to each mission, though I didn’t notice much of a difference when I split them between A-10 Warthog ground-attack aircraft and Eurofighter Typhoon air-superiority jets. (It’s possible I wasn’t paying close enough attention.) After starting out in the F/A-18C multirole fighter — which Kono told me in December is his favorite and serves as the game’s “hero aircraft”– players can unlock more than 30 real and fictional aircraft, each with its own stats and payload options. That variety makes some better suited for dogfights and others more effective against ground targets.

Unlocking is handled through a tech tree of sorts, starting with the F/A-18C and branching out not just to new aircraft but also to perks, including improved missile performance and larger bomb payloads. These can be equipped before missions, though each jet has a different perk capacity. With more than 100 standard missiles and dozens of additional missile and bomb options, armaments have always been where Ace Combat shifts from realistic aviation to arcade-style air combat. But it serves the heroic-pilot fantasy well — and makes missed shots a lot less painful.

We jumped around for the last segment of the preview. The fourth mission was a good blend of targets below and above, featuring harbors full of naval vessels to bomb, protected by enemy fighter jets. But it was the ninth mission that stopped me in my tracks: taking on a land battleship that looked like the USS Iowa on treads. My objective was to immobilize it while the iron leviathan’s guns, hovering quadcopter escorts and swirling defensive drone swarm tried to blast me out of the sky. They succeeded a few times, and it took several retries (and collapsed hotel buildings) to finally lock the beast in place.

The last mission we got to play, the 11th, had my squad taking on massive flying-wing aircraft transporting land battleship parts into enemy territory. Thanks to radar jamming, I had to track the skyborne behemoths by their long contrails, then bring my squad in close and rely on short-range missiles and gunfire to take them down. Flanked by fighter escorts, I screamed through the clouds in a visually breathtaking sequence, seeing firsthand the game’s Cloudly tech that Kono had described to me back in December.

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This feeling of breathless adventure among the clouds is one of the three core pillars at the heart of Ace Combat 8’s design philosophy, Kono told me and other media at the preview. Every decision they made needed to feed or strengthen one of them.

“The first [pillar] is photorealistic expression of the sky and giving the player the freedom to soar through it how they see fit,” Kono said. “The second is also at the player’s discretion, which enemies to engage with and the satisfaction of dogfights in the sky. The third is this process of becoming an ace pilot in the world, so you go from rookie to hero in the world of Ace Combat.” (Then he laughed, saying that there might be a fourth pillar they hadn’t even realized existed, given how vocal fans have been about the franchise’s background music.)

For all the effort devoted to realism, from recreating the world’s most iconic fighter aircraft to simulating cloud moisture droplets on the cockpit canopy, Ace Combat still delivers a powerful fantasy: that of a skyborne gunfighter fighting for what’s right. While I was caught off guard by Ace Combat 8’s decision to incorporate social media warfare, I was still swept up in watching my pilot’s legend grow — ideally through missiles and slick flying rather than doctored smartphone videos.

A forum thread titled “Hacking for Profit. Working method” offers a rare glance into how underground communities pass information about vulnerability exploitation and hacking techniques in a form of tutorial.

The post, written by an actor using the name “Hercules”, is not especially long or technical.”Its value lies in breaking down a complex process into clear, actionable steps. It covers how to scan, detect, assess, exploit, and monetize vulnerabilities in the wild, while also offering rare insight into the significance of vulnerability disclosure programs.”

Flare researchers analyzed the original post along with the responses over a period of a few months. The activity around the thread shows that its influence was not limited to the original post. Multiple users thanked “Hercules”, asked to connect privately, described themselves as beginners, or said they wanted guidance on how to move from theoretical learning to practical hacking. The response around the thread suggests that “Hercules” did more than describe a method.

This post was so popular that the same method was reposted and discussed across four additional forums. The threat actor gives novice threat actors a simple framework for understanding vulnerability exploitation and how to gain money from it.

What the Tutorial Shows

“Hercules” explains how to monetize a vulnerability discovery in the wild. He begins with advice on how to search for newly disclosed vulnerabilities, especially high-impact classes such as remote code execution, authentication bypass, account takeover, IDOR, and data exposure. He then moves to identifying exposed systems, validating whether those systems may be vulnerable, and deciding whether the results should be reported, sold, or exploited.

Three aspects stand out in the threat actor’s tutorial:

1. The usage of the Nuclei framework by projectdiscovery.io, which is highly popular among offensive security practitioners. 

2. The understanding of the challenges defenders have when patching newly discovered vulnerabilities. These topics are further discussed in an educational blog by Yakir Kadkoda and Ilay Goldman in the “50 shades of vulnerabilities: Uncovering Flaws in Open-Source Vulnerability Disclosure”.

3. The tutorial is divided into “legal” and “illegal” parts. Meaning the reader can stop at any stage and decide to move from vulnerability disclosure to hacking. 

Accessibility as the Main Selling Point

The most effective part of the tutorial is not a technical trick. It is the tone. “Hercules” writes in plain language and presents the process as something that can be learned through action. He argues that many tutorials focus too much on computer science, operating systems, programming, or scanner parameters, while beginners want to “hack,” “break in,” and “gain access.”

He also suggests that users do not need to be advanced software engineers to begin. Public tools, community templates, automation, and even AI assistance are presented as ways to reduce the barrier, while programming skills are described as useful but not mandatory. The underlying message is simple: the technical gap is smaller than beginners think.

That message explains much of the forum response. One user said they had finished many hacking courses but still could not apply them in the real world. Another said they did not even know how to program and asked whether that would be a problem.

Others asked “Hercules” to contact them privately, said they wanted to learn under his guidance, or praised the post as clear and well structured.

The Monetization Layer

The most intriguing part of the method is the monetization logic. “Hercules” describes several actions his “students” can take once a vulnerability is discovered:

1. Approach the owner of the server/website or hosting company and ask for payment in exchange for vulnerability information. Hercules even says that some people will provide payment in exchange for vulnerability disclosure and also says “…you can take your money home and be proud of yourself”.

2. Offer the finding on the underground markets. “Hercules” even suggests that an actor could approach the victim and sell the information elsewhere at the same time. 

3. Exploit the vulnerability and detect what’s on the server.

Remote code execution can become access sold to botnet operators, used for illicit resource abuse, or leveraged for data theft. Account takeover, IDOR, and data leak vulnerabilities are framed as assets that can be sold quickly.

“Hercules” describes himself as a hacker rather than a fraudster, preferring to sell quickly instead of conducting downstream fraud.

The Forum Reaction: Demand for Practical Mentorship

The replies show that the post resonated because it offered experience and confidence, not just information. Users repeatedly asked for private contact, mentorship, and additional guidance. Some were blocked by forum limitations and said they could not send private messages yet.

Others described the post as a useful starting point and waited for follow-up material. Following are some replies from the thread:

This long tail of engagement is significant. A sophisticated exploit write-up may attract technical readers, but a simple, motivational workflow can attract a broader audience.

It can remain relevant for months because it does not depend on one specific vulnerability. It teaches a reusable mindset: monitor new flaws, find exposed systems, validate, monetize, and repeat.

From a threat intelligence perspective, that makes the thread valuable even without unique indicators. It reveals how new actors are taught to think, what vulnerability classes they are encouraged to prioritize, and how experienced forum members convert curiosity into participation.

The post is also a soft recruitment channel, with “Hercules” repeatedly inviting users to contact him privately.

Why This Matters for Defenders

This tutorial calls attention to three aspects in a vulnerability program. 

1. Critical and reachable vulnerabilities are highly targeted. We don’t need a post in the underground to know that. There are many automated botnets in the wild that are updated minutes after newly vulnerabilities are disclosed and PoCs are released. But even novice hackers are being trained today that these are high-valued targets.

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2. The long tail of old vulnerabilities also matters. These legacy servers, old Drupal or WordPress sites with 2019 vulnerabilities will also be exploited by novice hackers.

3. Your paid vulnerability disclosure program matters. If they get paid, they will probably have more motivation to disclose the vulnerability. Even if they sell it on the dark web, once they disclosed the vulnerability, you will probably mitigate the risks.

Beyond “Hercules”

The thread is not important because it introduces a new hacking technique. It is important because it demonstrates how cybercrime scales through simplification. “Hercules” takes a complex topic and turns it into a practical business workflow that beginners can understand.

The replies show that this approach works: users who were unsure, inexperienced, or frustrated by theory responded with interest.

Cybercriminal capability does not grow only through elite malware development or zero-day exploitation. It also grows through accessible tutorials, mentorship, public tooling, and communities that make illegal activity feel achievable.

Learn more by signing up for our free trial.

Sponsored and written by Flare.

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