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Sony’s New WF-1000XM6 Earbuds Put Fantastic Sound In A Frustrating Package

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Of all the earbuds I’ve tested in my career — and there have been a lot — Sony’s always hold a special place in my heart. The Sony WF-1000XM6 earbuds are among the best you can buy in personal audio. Nearby competitors include the Bose QC Ultra 2 earbuds and the Apple AirPods Pro 3. The XM6 earbuds can stand toe-to-toe with either of those brands in many ways, and that’s great.

But Sony also has a few things it still needs to work out. In this day and age, great sound is one thing, but putting together the whole package remains a challenge for the audio company. The issues I have aren’t major, but when the buds command as high a price as these do, compromise can’t be taken lightly. It’s the 6th generation of this series and, to be frank, these things should’ve been worked out by now.

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Nonetheless, these buds are still class leading in the same fields, so in many ways they’re the buds to beat. I’ve been using a pair of Sony WF1000XM6 earbuds provided by Sony for about 10 days.

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Growing hardware

One of the more notable differences between the XM6 earbuds and their XM5 predecessors is the size — and not in a good way. Both the earbuds and their case got noticeably bigger. That wouldn’t be a problem except the expected tradeoff for an increase in size — better battery life — is not there. Both generations of earbuds have similar battery life: eight hours for the XM6 with active noise cancellation on, and 24 hours total with the case.

The XM6 earbuds have more microphones and redesigned driver units, which is cool, but not only are the earbuds and the case chonkier, but the case has sharper angles to it as well. That makes it annoying to carry in my pants pocket: the previous-generation XM5s had a slimmer, shorter, and more rounded-profile case, which slipped into a pocket easily and didn’t dig into your knee while walking around. It seems like a minor design change, but it’s definitely a minus in my book.

Sony also stuck with foam ear tips, which I think is a good move overall. Most earbuds opt for a silicone ear tip to help form a good seal with the ear canal. Foam can do that, but silicone feels more secure overall. However, silicone can also irritate the ear canal making your ears itch. I haven’t had that problem with Sony earbuds of late, which is a big win.

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Speaking of foam

The main attributes by which all earbuds are judged are comfort and sound, of course, and foam helps with both. From a comfort standpoint, these earbuds are lovely. Long-term listening sessions are great: there’s no itching in the ear canal, nor do they cause fatigue over the long term. I generally don’t have marathon listening sessions, but I tested these for a few hours at a time while working, and I never minded wearing them in the slightest.

Sony’s choice of foam also helps form a better seal in your ear canal than silicone-using rivals, at least in my opinion. Since foam can be squished and will expand back into its original shape, it can fit your ear canal better than silicone. How much of a real difference this makes in terms of sound is up for debate, of course. This is more of a personal preference.

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Cone of silence

Up until now, Bose’s Quiet Comfort Ultra earbuds have held my personal crown for the best active noise cancellation (ANC) you can buy in a pair of earbuds, with the AirPods 3 Pro being a very close second. Well, Sony has entered the chat. The ANC that these earbuds are capable of is right in the middle of the conversation as well. It’s hard to definitively declare who is doing the best job here; airplanes are usually my go-to for determining the best ANC, but my travel plans didn’t line up with the testing period here.

In day-to-day life, though, the XM6 are impressive in their ability to eliminate noise around you. That includes both droning sounds — like of a car engine — but also sudden noises, like people talking to you. The latter is by far the hardest to eliminate, and these buds do that as well as either of the other two options. It’s a big step for Sony; you used to have to be content with amazing sound and ANC that was good, but not great, and that’s no longer the case.

The earbuds still have a decent amount of side-tone to them, the amount of your own voice that reverberates in your head when you’re wearing headphones or earbuds. Bose still does a better job in that regard. But these still aren’t bad at all. 

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Exquisite sound

These earbuds sound really great. The XM6 have newly redesigned drivers tuned by grammy winning musicians, which is promising, and overall they’re capable of nuance that I don’t normally hear in my earbuds. That’s saying something because my ears are also damaged from a misspent youth in a metal band.

Picking out individual tones that I simply don’t hear with other earbuds is a remarkable experience. I mostly listen to podcasts, and these earbuds are a particular kind of overkill for that listening experience. But, while I was working, I took in music for several hours at a stretch, including the likes of Scorpions’ “Alien Nation”, Lindsey Stirling’s “Roundtable Rival”, and Ozzy Osbourne’s “No More Tears” among others. From the deepest bass line to the highest violin, the XM6 manage a lovely range of tones throughout the spectrum.

The earbuds ship with a pretty flat equalizer, as they should. You have your choice of five different presets for the 10-band equalizer, and you can have up to three other custom EQs. I didn’t need to tweak the EQ too much to find my sweet spot. The buds just have remarkable sound without having to adjust settings in that regard, but that brings us to arguably the biggest downside in the Sony earbud experience.

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Sony’s software is not great

A while back, Sony shipped Sound Connect in an effort to consolidate its various apps into one experience. It should’ve taken the opportunity to revamp its software at the same time. My biggest gripe is how you take these earbuds that are amazing in just about every way, and nerf them by compromising the controls.

Within Sound Connect, you can adjust what touch controls do on each earbud, but you can only cycle through three preset options for the earbuds: one tap activates ANC, two taps skips to the next song, and three taps goes back, for example. That’s mostly the extent of the customization, with one exception.

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Two or three taps of an earbud can optionally launch a music service of your choice, with what Sony calls “Quick access services”. You can have two taps launch YouTube music, for example, while three taps launch Spotify. That’s it, the full extent of the customizations Sony’s flagship earbuds offer.

Even before Sound Connect, this was a pain point in Sony’s earbuds. There’s really no reason why you shouldn’t be able to configure your earbuds for whatever you want; if I want to play my music with a single tap, adjust volume with two taps, and summon my assistant with three taps, that’s my business. All Sony’s doing here is limiting options and it’s arguably the one thing that sours the listening experience.

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Sony WF-1000XM6 earbuds verdict

The Sony WF-1000XM6 earbuds are priced at $329. That’s more than the AirPods Pro at $249, and even Bose’s $299 QC Ultra 2 earbuds. Is it a fair price? That’s arguable. Sony’s sound performance is better than either of those rivals, but Apple in particular makes a strong argument with extras like hearing aid functionality.

All that being said, there’s a reason why an update to Sony’s WF-1000 series is something I look forward to year after year. For 2026, there were some noticeable steps back in terms of design, yet when it comes to sound quality these are still the earbuds to beat. You just enjoy a fuller sound than you get with any other mainstream set of earbuds. True, there are audiophile earbuds out there that might get you more nuance and detail, but if you want the best sound you can buy in this price range, there really isn’t competition.



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Bluesky’s CEO is stepping down after nearly 5 years

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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, who has led the upstart social platform since 2021, is stepping down from her role as its top executive. Toni Schneider, who has been an advisor and investor in Bluesky, will take over the job temporarily while Graber stays on as Chief Innovation Officer.

“As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things,” Graber wrote in a blog post. Schneider, who was previously CEO at WordPress parent Automattic, will be that “experienced operator and leader” while Blueksy’s board searches for a permanent CEO, she said.

Graber’s history with Bluesky dates back to its early days as a side project at Jack Dorsey’s Twitter. She was officially brought on as CEO in 2021 as Bluesky spun off into an independent company (it officially ended its association with Twitter in 2022 and Dorsey cut ties with Bluesky in 2024). She led the company through its launch and early viral success as it grew from an invitation-only platform to the 43 million-user service it is today. During that time, she’s become known as an advocate for decentralized social media and for trolling Mark Zuckerberg’s t-shirt choices.

Nearly three years since it launched publicly, Bluesky has carved out a small but influential niche in the post-Twitter social landscape. The platform is less than a third of the size of Meta’s competitor, Threads, which has also copied some of Bluesky’s signature features. Bluesky also has yet to roll out any meaningful monetization features, though it has teased a premium subscription service in the past.

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As Chief Innovation Officer, Graber will presumably still be an influential voice at the company going forward. And, as Wired points out, she still has a seat on Bluesky’s board so she will get some say in who steps into the role permanently. Until then, Schneider, who is also a partner at VC firm Tre Ventures, will lead the company. “I deeply believe in what this team has built and the open social web they’re fighting for,” he wrote in a post on Bluesky.

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Real Consequences: Trump’s Bullshit Claim About Tylenol Is Seeing Real World Results

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from the fever-dream dept

There’s this insane subset of people who, when they talk about Donald Trump, I’ll never understand. It’s the ones who claim that taking what Donald Trump says seriously is a mistake that most people are unlikely to make. It’s also expressed by the crowd that claims something to the effect of: you shouldn’t take Trump literally, but you should take him seriously.

That this is said about the most powerful single individual on the planet is bonkers. This is typically how I’ve talked about my own kids when they were toddlers. Inevitably, one of my kids would be trying to say something entirely innocuous, only to have what came out of their mouth be some horrible word or swear or something. And I would hand-wave that away. C’mon, I’d tell people, you know that’s not what he meant to say.

Donald Trump is, unfortunately, the President of the United States of America. When he speaks, people listen. And a percentage of those listening will take him both literally and seriously. And when Donald Trump told American women last year to not take Tylenol, or give it to their young children, because it would give their kids autism, well, they listened.

Researchers found that in the wake of that batshit crazy announcement, use of Tylenol and its generic equivalents dropped significantly in use in emergency rooms and prescriptions written for children.

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For nearly three months after that, new research found, Tylenol orders for pregnant women showing up in emergency rooms dropped and prescriptions of the generic drug for children rose. This happened despite sharp criticism of the president’s message from doctor groups saying that the drug, leucovorin, shouldn’t be broadly used for autism and Tylenol is safe during pregnancy.

“It just shows that in our country right now, health care has been politicized in a way that political messages are driving and impacting care — and not always for good,” said Dr. Susan Sirota, a pediatrician in Highland Park, Illinois, who wasn’t involved with the research.

The research suggested something like a 10% drop in measurable use of acetaminophen or paracetamol in the wake of Trump’s announcement. That doesn’t tell the whole story, of course, since so much of the use of Tylenol occurs through over the counter purchases at drug stores and the like. Based on market research, however, Tylenol specifically saw a nearly identical 11% or so drop in OTC sales as well back in November.

But that isn’t all. With all of this attention on a common drug supposedly giving children autism, parental anxiety about the condition has shot up as well. And, as a result, parents are turning toward experimental drugs for that that defy expert recommendations. That’s where leucovorin comes in.

Leucovorin is a derivative of folic acid used for, among other things, reducing the toxic side effects of certain chemotherapy drugs and treating a rare blood disorder. It has also been studied for a neurological condition known as cerebral folate deficiency and for a subset of autistic children, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The pediatrics group doesn’t recommend routine use of the drug for autistic children. Early, small-scale studies have explored its use, “and some findings suggest potential benefit in carefully selected cases,” the group said.

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Still, after the federal announcement about the drug, Sirota said some families in her practice asked about getting it for their autistic children. She educated them about the evidence, told them about the potential for side effects and didn’t prescribe it. Potential side effects include irritability, nausea and vomiting and skin issues like dermatitis.

This may sound melodramatic, but there is real psychological harm being done to those just starting families in this country. For most parents, their children become their entire world. Their raison d’etre. And if you scare the shit out of them about Tylenol giving their kids a disorder, they’re going to stop taking the common drug and turn to any hair-brained lifeline they can find to try to keep their children from that disorder.

Does leucovorin do anything at all for anyone with autism? I don’t have the slightest clue. And neither does the Trump administration. I’m quite confident that there is no current reason to see Tylenol as a danger to the general populace, however, and that didn’t stop Trump from going on television and playing doctor.

“It feels like a pattern with our government, right? They keep building on these houses of cards that just fall down,” she said. “This politicizing of medicine just in general, and moving away from science, has been so challenging.”

The consequences of this sort of thing are going to span decades. Let that sink in.

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Filed Under: donald trump, health, rfk jr., tylenol

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Satya Nadella denies Xbox death rumors, insists Microsoft is "long on gaming"

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Speaking with newly appointed Microsoft Gaming head Asha Sharma, Nadella dismissed speculation that the company might abandon gaming in favor of Windows, Azure, and AI. He described gaming as one of Microsoft’s “main identities” over the past couple of decades and said it will remain a core part of the…
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OpenAI and Google Workers File Amicus Brief in Support of Anthropic Against the US Government

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More than 30 employees from OpenAI and Google, including Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed an amicus brief on Monday in support of Anthropic in its legal fight against the US government.

“If allowed to proceed, this effort to punish one of the leading US AI companies will undoubtedly have consequences for the United States’ industrial and scientific competitiveness in the field of artificial intelligence and beyond,” the employees wrote.

The brief was filed just hours after Anthropic sued the Department of Defense and other federal agencies over the Pentagon’s decision to designate the company a “supply-chain risk.” The sanction, which severely limits Anthropic’s ability to work with military contractors, went into effect after Anthropic’s negotiations with the Pentagon fell apart. The AI startup is seeking a temporary restraining order to continue its work with military partners as the lawsuit progresses. This brief specifically supports this motion.

Signatories of the brief include Google DeepMind researchers Zhengdong Wang, Alexander Matt Turner, and Noah Siegel, as well as OpenAI researchers Gabriel Wu, Pamela Mishkin, and Roman Novak, among others. Amicus briefs are legal filings submitted by parties that are not directly involved in a court case but that have expertise relevant to it. The employees signed in a personal capacity and don’t represent the views of their companies, according to the brief.

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OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The amicus brief says that the Pentagon’s decision to blacklist Anthropic “introduces an unpredictability in [their] industry that undermines American innovation and competitiveness” and “chills professional debate on the benefits and risks of frontier AI systems.” It notes that the Pentagon could have simply dropped Anthropic’s contract if it no longer wished to be bound by its terms.

The brief also says that the red lines Anthropic claims it requested, including that its AI wouldn’t be used for mass domestic surveillance and the development of autonomous lethal weapons, are legitimate concerns and require sufficient guardrails. “In the absence of public law, the contractual and technological requirements that AI developers impose on the use of their systems represent a vital safeguard against their catastrophic misuse,” the brief says.

Several other AI leaders have also publicly questioned the Pentagon’s decision to label Anthropic a supply-chain risk. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a post on social media that “enforcing the SCR [supply-chain risk] designation on Anthropic would be very bad for our industry and our country.” He added that “this is a very bad decision from the DoW and I hope they reverse it.” As Anthropic’s relationship with the Pentagon soured, OpenAI quickly signed its own contract with the US military, a decision some people criticized as opportunistic.

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Worried about Australian age verification measures? I’ve found the cheapest way to secure your personal data for years to come

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Australia’s new age verification legislation has left Australians raising their eyebrows.

Similar to enforcements in the UK and US, citizens will be required to verify that they are over 18 to access adult content. But, with this comes concerns that people’s most sensitive data will be put at risk by communications with third parties.

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New York lawmakers move to block AI chatbots from giving legal or medical advice

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  • A proposed New York bill would ban AI chatbots from providing legal or medical advice
  • The legislation would allow users to sue companies if their chatbots impersonate licensed professionals
  • Lawmakers say the measure is meant to protect the public as AI tools become more widely used

AI chatbots have spent the past few years answering nearly every kind of question imaginable, but New York lawmakers are preparing to draw a firm line around at least a couple of categories of conversation. A bill advancing through the state legislature would prohibit AI chatbots from providing legal or medical advice and would allow users to sue the companies behind those systems if they cross that boundary.

The proposal, Senate Bill S7263, would apply to AI chatbots that mimic or impersonate licensed professionals such as lawyers or physicians. The heart of the bill applies the same principle about how individuals cannot practice law or medicine without the appropriate licenses to AI. That rule is meant to ensure that people receive guidance from trained professionals who can be held accountable for their advice.

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The open-source AI red-teaming tool used by Fortune 500 companies is now part of OpenAI

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The acquisition of Promptfoo, which counts more than 125,000 developers and 30-plus Fortune 500 companies among its users, is OpenAI’s most direct move yet into AI application security. Its technology will go into Frontier, the company’s enterprise agent platform launched just a month ago.

When Ian Webster was leading the LLM engineering team at Discord, shipping AI products to 200 million users, he noticed something the security industry had not yet caught up with: the tools his team relied on to keep those products safe were built for a different era. Traditional vulnerability scanners could not reason about prompt injection. Static analysis had nothing to say about a model that promised a user something it had no authority to deliver. The testing infrastructure for AI applications, he concluded, simply did not exist.

So he built it himself, nights and weekends, as an open-source project. That project became Promptfoo. On Monday, OpenAI announced it is acquiring the company.

The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, will see Promptfoo’s technology integrated into OpenAI Frontier, the enterprise agent management platform that OpenAI launched in early February. In a post on X, OpenAI said the acquisition would “strengthen agentic security testing and evaluation capabilities” within Frontier, and pledged that Promptfoo would remain open source under its current licence, with continued support for existing customers.

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Promptfoo, which Webster co-founded with Michael D’Angelo – a former VP of engineering and head of AI at identity verification firm Smile Identity – launched commercially in 2024 with $5 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The seed round attracted backing from a notable roster of angels, including Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, Discord CTO Stanislav Vishnevskiy, and Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest. By July 2025, the company had raised an $18.4 million Series A led by Insight Partners, with a16z again participating. Total funding ahead of the acquisition was approximately $23.4 million.

At the time of the Series A, Promptfoo said it had more than 125,000 developers using its open-source framework and over 30 Fortune 500 companies running its enterprise platform in production. Customers span retail, telecoms, financial services, and media, sectors with acute exposure to the regulatory and reputational risks of AI failures.

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The product works by acting as an automated adversary. Rather than relying on manual penetration testing, Promptfoo’s platform talks directly to a customer’s AI application, through its chat interface or APIs, using specialised models and agents that behave like users, or specifically like attackers. When an attack succeeds, the platform records it, analyses why it worked, and iterates through an agentic reasoning loop to refine the test and expose deeper vulnerabilities. Risks the platform targets include prompt injection, data leakage, jailbreaks, and what Webster has called “application-level” failures: AI systems that promise users things they cannot deliver, or that reveal database contents to a customer service query, or that stray into political opinion in a homework tutor.

It is precisely those application-level risks that make Promptfoo’s acquisition a strategic fit for OpenAI’s current direction. Frontier, which OpenAI has described as an attempt to create “AI coworkers” for the enterprise, is designed to give AI agents access to production systems, CRM platforms, data warehouses, internal ticketing tools, and to execute workflows with real-world consequences. Agents operating at that level of access create a correspondingly enlarged attack surface. Early customers named by OpenAI for Frontier include Uber, State Farm, Intuit, and Thermo Fisher Scientific: organisations for whom a misbehaving agent is not an inconvenience but a liability.

OpenAI has been building out Frontier at speed. Since launching the platform on 5 February, the company has announced Frontier Alliances with Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, Capgemini, and McKinsey, enlisting the consulting firms to drive enterprise deployment. Separately, the company has been rolling out Codex Security, an AI-powered application security agent for software repositories, formerly known internally as Aardvark, which entered wider availability on the same day as the Promptfoo acquisition announcement.

Promptfoo is not the only AI security product entering broader availability this month. Anthropic launched Claude Code Security in February, targeting similar vulnerability scanning use cases. The convergence suggests that as AI agents move into production at scale, the question of who secures them, and how,  is fast becoming one of the defining commercial battlegrounds in enterprise AI.

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For Promptfoo’s open-source community, OpenAI’s commitment to keeping the project open source under its current licence will be the line to watch. The project has over 248 contributors, and its adoption by developers at companies across the AI industry – including, according to Promptfoo’s own website, teams at Anthropic and Google – was built on the premise that the tool belonged to the developer community rather than to any one vendor. That promise now sits alongside a commercial integration into one of the most powerful enterprise AI platforms in the market.

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Microsoft Teams phishing targets employees with A0Backdoor malware

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Microsoft Teams phishing targets employees with backdoors

Hackers contacted employees at financial and healthcare organizations over Microsoft Teams to trick them into granting remote access through Quick Assist and deploy a new piece of malware called A0Backdoor.

The attacker relies on social engineering to gain the employee’s trust by first flooding their inbox with spam and then contacting them over Teams, pretending to be the company’s IT staff, offering assistance with the unwanted messages.

To obtain access to the target machine, the threat actor instructs the user to start a Quick Assist remote session, which is used to deploy a malicious toolset that includes digitally signed MSI installers hosted in a personal Microsoft cloud storage account.

According to researchers at cybersecurity company BlueVoyant, the malicious MSI files masquerade as Microsoft Teams components and the CrossDeviceService, a legitimate Windows tool used by the Phone Link app.

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Commandline argument for CrossDeviceService.exe
Command line argument to install the malicious CrossDeviceService.exe
Source: BlueVoyant

Using the DLL sideloading technique with legitimate Microsoft binaries, the attacker deploys a malicious library (hostfxr.dll) that contains compressed or encrypted data. Once loaded in memory, the library decrypts the data into shellcode and transfers execution to it.

The researchers say that the malicious library also uses the CreateThread function to prevent analysis. BlueVoyant explains that the excessive thread creation could cause a debugger to crash, but it does not have a significant impact under normal execution.

The shellcode performs sandbox detection and then generates a SHA-256-derived key, which it uses to extract the A0Backdoor, which is encrypted using the AES algorithm.

Encrypted payload in the shellcode
Encrypted payload in the shellcode
Source: BlueVoyant

The malware relocates itself into a new memory region, decrypts its core routines, and relies on Windows API calls (e.g., DeviceIoControl, GetUserNameExW, and GetComputerNameW) to collect information about the host and fingerprint it.

Communication with the command-and-control (C2) is hidden in DNS traffic, with the malware sending DNS MX queries with encoded metadata in high-entropy subdomains to public recursive resolvers. The DNS servers respond with MX records containing encoded command data.

Captured DNS communication
Captured DNS communication
Source: BlueVoyant

“The malware extracts and decodes the leftmost label to recover command/configuration data, then proceeds accordingly,” explains BlueVoyant.

“Using DNS MX records helps the traffic blend in and can evade controls tuned to detect TXT-based DNS tunneling, which may be more commonly monitored.”

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BlueVoyant states that two of the targets of this campaign are a financial institution in Canada and a global healthcare organization.

The researchers assess with moderate-to-high confidence that the campaign is an evolution of tactics, techniques and procedures associated with the BlackBasta ransomware gang, which has dissolved after the internal chat logs of the operation were leaked.

While there are plenty of overlaps, BlueVoyant notes that the use of signed MSIs and malicious DLLs, the A0Backdoor payload, and using DNS MX-based C2 communication are new elements.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

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Microsoft’s new Copilot Cowork integrates Anthropic’s Claude in rollout of new E7 licensing tier

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Microsoft is leveraging its new Anthropic partnership to bolster Copilot adoption among businesses. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)

Microsoft unveiled Copilot Cowork, a new AI assistant that can run tasks in the background, create documents, and work across Microsoft 365 apps, the company announced Monday.

The product integrates technology from Anthropic’s Claude family of models into Microsoft’s existing Copilot assistant, the latest example of Microsoft expanding beyond its tight partnership with OpenAI. Anthropic already offers Claude Cowork through its own platform.

It comes as Microsoft tries to boost adoption of Copilot, which remains a relatively small fraction of its commercial user base amid big investments in AI infrastructure.

Copilot Cowork is part of what Microsoft is calling Wave 3 of Microsoft 365 Copilot. The company also announced a new $99-per-user Microsoft 365 E7 tier launching May 1 — a new level of its technology licensing program for businesses — which bundles Copilot, identity management tools, and a new $15 Agent 365 product for managing AI agents.

The E7 tier costs 65% more than the current $60 E5 subscription.

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“Customers have told us E5 alone is no longer enough; they do not want multiple tools stitched together, they want one trusted solution,” Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, wrote in a blog post.

Microsoft says Copilot Cowork can handle multiple tasks simultaneously, pulling from a user’s calendar, email, and files to complete work without constant supervision.

“Copilot Chat already makes it easy to research topics and think through ideas, and Copilot Cowork allows you to take action and complete activities in the background so you can get more work done on a regular basis,” said Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s president of Business Applications & Agents, in a demo video.

In the video, Lamanna showed Copilot Cowork analyzing a month of meetings with direct reports, compiling customer notes from a business trip, and generating a competitive analysis with accompanying Word document and Excel spreadsheet. 

The company emphasized the role of Work IQ, its intelligence layer that connects Copilot to a user’s work patterns, relationships, and content across Microsoft 365.

Copilot Cowork runs within Microsoft 365’s security and compliance boundaries, with actions and outputs auditable by default. Microsoft is pitching its multi-model approach as a differentiator, saying it will choose the right model for each task regardless of provider.

The announcement drew mixed reactions. Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of “Co-Intelligence” who studies AI adoption, raised questions on LinkedIn.

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“Will it continue to use lower-end models or older models without telling you the way Copilot does?” Mollick wrote. He also asked whether Microsoft would keep the product updated, noting that Anthropic’s standalone Cowork product “was built in a couple of weeks using Claude Code and is being updated and evolving quickly.” 

Microsoft, he added, “has a tendency to launch a leading product and then let it sit for awhile,” noting that he was “curious about whether their pacing will change.”

Copilot Cowork is available in limited research preview and will roll out to Microsoft’s Frontier program later this month.

[Editor’s Note: Charles Lamanna will be among the speakers at GeekWire’s upcoming AI event, Agents of Transformation, March 24. More info and tickets.]

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What is the release date for The Pitt season 2 episode 10 on HBO Max?

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For good reason, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) is on the verge of quitting again in The Pitt season 2. He’s already due to go on a three-month sabbatical when this hellish Fourth of July shift ends, but now that’s starting to feel like a permanent leave of absence.

In his defence, I don’t blame him. The ER is currently under digital lockdown to prevent a cyber attack, meaning no computer records can be accessed, the number of patients practically doubles every five seconds, and replacement Dr. Al-Hashimi (Sepideh Moafi) isn’t making life easier for anyone.

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