EdTechSR Ep 359: Phishing Meets Copilot

Welcome to episode 359 (“Phishing Meets Copilot”) of the EdTech Situation Room from September 24, 2025 , where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) unpack how AI is reshaping both the attack surface and the classroom: we start with MIT Tech Review’s claim that 80% of ransomware now uses AI , then swap real-world spear-phishing stories and practical school-IT hygiene—like rethinking public staff email directories to reduce pattern-based credential attacks and mass phishing. From there we zoom out to information warfare and media literacy via PRX’s “GoLaxy Papers,” a report on targeted AI personas trained on individuals to covertly influence U.S. audiences—prompting a broader conversation about nation-state psy-ops and what educators can do to help students (and themselves) discern manipulation at scale. We also discuss the shift to short-form video: TikTok’s pull on teen news habits, YouTube’s push to Shorts, weak sponsor-disclosure norms among creators, and why this all raises the stakes for day-to-day media-literacy instruction. On the tools front, Microsoft’s strategic partnership with Anthropic brings Claude Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.1 into Copilot—expanding multi-model options for educators and admins—and we map concrete “first-week” workflows inside Office apps. We tie that to “vibe coding” (prompt-based programming) as a teachable practice: Wes shares a personal project (an AI-assisted AppleScript/JS “federated reader” that curates newsletters and posts to Mastodon) and floats the idea of a high-school vibe-coding elective. We balance the security talk with a hopeful AI-in-healthcare segment—Nature-reported work (via ScienceAlert) on a model trained on UK Biobank data that forecasts 1,000+ diseases years in advance , and what “predict-then-prevent” might mean for future wellness curricula. Finally, Jason gives early impressions of Apple’s new iPhones (hello, 17 Pro Max) alongside pragmatic upgrade advice for families on carrier plans. Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too!

You can listen to EdTechSR Ep 359: Phishing Meets Copilot online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

EdTechSR Ep 359: Phishing Meets Copilot is an episode from EdTech Situation Room by @techsavvyteach & @wfryer by @techsavvyteach & @wfryer.

This episode is 69:18 long.

This episode was published on Oct 27, 2025.

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