Copilot — Cowork general availability

Copilot Cowork is now generally available

Copilot Cowork has moved out of preview and is now generally available. It lets users build agents and skills that automate repetitive, multi-step work across Microsoft 365 — drafting content, producing reports, triaging tickets and more — bringing autonomous task handling to everyday users.

Security — AI agent threats

AutoJack: How a single page can RCE the host running your AI agent

Microsoft’s Security team breaks down “AutoJack,” a technique where a single malicious web page can achieve remote code execution on the machine hosting an AI agent. It’s a clear illustration of the new attack surface that autonomous agents create when they browse and act on untrusted web content.

Security — Email protection

Microsoft Defender email security benchmarking: Key insights from one year of data

Drawing on a full year of benchmarking data, Microsoft shares what it’s learned about email threats and how organisations’ protection stacks up over time. Useful context for anyone tuning their Defender email-security posture.

Security — Industry recognition

Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2026 Extended Detection and Response Platforms Wave

Microsoft has been named a Leader in Forrester’s 2026 Wave for Extended Detection and Response (XDR) platforms, reflecting the strength of its unified, cross-domain detection and response offering.

Infrastructure — Azure at scale

Azure sets a new performance record for LLM training benchmark at extreme scale

Azure has set a new performance record on a large-language-model training benchmark at extreme scale, underscoring the platform’s strength for the very largest AI training workloads.

After hours

Editorial

If you found this valuable, the I’d appreciate a ‘like’ or perhaps a donation at https://ko-fi.com/ciaops. This helps me know that people enjoy what I have created and provides resources to allow me to create more content. If you have any feedback or suggestions around this, I’m all ears. You can also find me via email director@ciaops.com and on X (Twitter) at https://www.twitter.com/directorcia.

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Watch out for the next CIA Brief next week

• Introducing Microsoft 365 Business with Copilot: The new standard for small business(opens in new window) Microsoft is launching two new small-business SKUs on 1 July — Business Standard with Copilot and Business Premium with Copilot — with Copilot built directly into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook. They add 1,000+ connectors (Shopify, Xero, Docusign and more), “Work IQ” business context, and access to OpenAI and Anthropic models. Built-in security controls like sensitivity labels and access revocation ensure Copilot only surfaces what each user is permitted to see.

• Introducing a new design for Microsoft 365 Copilot(opens in new window) Microsoft has redesigned the Copilot experience across Microsoft 365, turning the prompt line into a task-aware workspace with a single consistent entry point across apps and a progressive-disclosure interface. Performance improved with load times cut by more than half and complex prompts answering ~10% faster, alongside new agentic modes (Designer, Researcher, and in-app Word/Excel/PowerPoint agents). Microsoft reported usage gains of Word +27%, Excel +33%, PowerPoint +43% and Outlook +30%.

Security / Industry News

• The Gentlemen ransomware: Dissecting a self-propagating Go encryptor(opens in new window) Microsoft Threat Intelligence analysed “The Gentlemen,” a ransomware-as-a-service threat (operators tracked as Storm-2697) written in Go that uses per-file Curve25519 + XChaCha20 encryption and spreads aggressively through lateral movement. It employs double extortion, disables Microsoft Defender, and deletes shadow copies and logs to hinder recovery. Activity has been observed globally across education, transport, healthcare and finance sectors.

After hours

Mark Rober’s $60 Million Science Experiment – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDFGkBE2O50

Editorial

If you found this valuable, the I’d appreciate a ‘like’ or perhaps a donation at https://ko-fi.com/ciaops. This helps me know that people enjoy what I have created and provides resources to allow me to create more content. If you have any feedback or suggestions around this, I’m all ears. You can also find me via email director@ciaops.com and on X (Twitter) at https://www.twitter.com/directorcia.

If you want to be part of a dedicated Microsoft Cloud community with information and interactions daily, then consider becoming a CIAOPS Patron – www.ciaopspatron.com.

Watch out for the next CIA Brief next week