Microsoft said on Tuesday that it would be taking a series of steps towards becoming a “good neighbor” in communities where it is building data centers—including promising to ask public utilities to set higher electricity rates for data centers.

Speaking onstage at an event in Great Falls, Virginia, Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith directly referenced a growing national pushback to data centers, describing it as creating “a moment in time when we need to listen, and we need to address these concerns head-on.”

“When I visit communities around the country, people have questions—pointed questions. They even have concerns,” Smith said, as a slide showed headlines from various news outlets about opposition to data centers. “They are the type of questions that we need to heed… We are at a moment of time when people have a lot on their mind. They worry about the price of electricity. They wonder what this big data center will mean to their water supply. They look at this technology and ask, what will it mean for the jobs of the future? What will it mean for the adults of today? What will it mean for their children?”

The announcement follows a post from President Donald Trump on Truth Social Monday in which he pledged that his administration would work with “major American Technology Companies,” including Microsoft, to make sure that data centers don’t inflate customer utility bills.

“We are the ‘HOTTEST’ Country in the World, and Number One in AI,” Trump wrote in the post, in which he also accused Democrats of being responsible for the rise in utility bills. “Data Centers are key to that boom, and keeping Americans FREE and SECURE but, the big Technology Companies who build them must ‘pay their own way.’”

Average electricity bills have risen faster than inflation in recent years in many parts of the country. These price hikes are due to a variety of factors, including the costs of repairing and maintaining the country’s aging electric grid. But higher demand for electricity—including from data centers, which can also be expensive to connect to the grid—plays a role. As technology companies and utilities are predicting a massive new need for energy from the nationwide data center buildout, the Energy Information Administration projects that electric bills will keep increasing through 2026.

Concerns around data centers and electricity bills played a key role in several local and state midterm elections last year, while research released last fall shows that local opposition to data centers skyrocketed in the second quarter of 2025, leading to billions of dollars in projects stalled or cancelled. The political divide against data centers appears to be bipartisan. In recent months, influential former Trump strategist Steve Bannon has begun speaking against the energy and water costs of data centers on his War Room podcast, part of a larger pushback from some MAGA figureheads against the AI buildout in the US.

The Trump administration, by contrast, has made expediting the data center buildout in the US a key priority. It has removed a variety of environmental protections for data centers, including water protections, expedited the review of chemicals involved in their use, and encouraged their development on federal land. The Department of Energy has also instructed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees interstate transmission, to work on a suite of issues around data centers and the grid.

Microsoft, which has around 100 data centers planned or under construction across the country, has met with some local pushback to some of its projects. In October, the company canceled plans for a data center in Wisconsin due to local opposition; the group leading the charge against that project warned of a potential “5-15% rate hike to subsidize cheap power.” The company revealed last week that it was also behind a proposed project in Michigan, which was put on hold in December following concerns from community members. Hundreds of residents attended a planning commission meeting for the project Monday night, with many telling local media they were there to express opposition.

So-called ‘dual-channel’ attacks using multiple methods of communication either simultaneously or in sequence are becoming more prevalent as digital fraudsters seek out new ways to defeat cyber protections against business email compromise (BEC) scams, according to new data from security services supplier LevelBlue.

BEC attacks – which spoof trusted entities, often c-suite executives, then use their identities to convince victims to transfer money into the attackers’ pockets – have long been a bugbear for enterprise defenders.

“[BEC] continues to be one of the costliest cyber attacks as reported by the FBI’s IC3, with over $2.7bn (£2bn) in adjusted losses in 2024 alone,” wrote LevelBlue researcher Katrina Udquin.

“BEC attacks are not slowing down, and fraudsters continue to evolve their scamming techniques and arsenal,” she said.

According to LevelBlue, last year its systems observed a significant increase in BEC attacks in which the initial lure was a request for contact, seeking to establish the potential victim’s mobile number or personal email address. A total of 43% of lures that it saw took this form, compared to 31% which took the form of a more traditional request for a payroll transfer, and 10% which asked for invoice payments or wire transfers.

Such request for contact lures are very often a precursor to a dual-channel attack seeking to move the conversation to an alternative platform.

LevelBlue’s systems tallied over 5,000 unique dual-channel attacks in 2025, and found that in 66% of them, the cyber fraudsters tried to move the conversation to traditional SMS messaging, in 32% of cases to messaging applications such as WhatsApp, and in 2% of cases to personal email addresses.

The rationale behind this tactic is a relatively simple one – external mobile networks, messaging applications and personal email addresses will in almost all circumstances fall well beyond the purview of any enterprise IT security department.

Done successfully, a dual-channel attack renders expensive email protection services basically useless, meaning all security teams can do is hope that the social engineering modules of their cyber training courses have been effective.

Related to this, LevelBlue said it also observed an increase in callback phishing, in which the criminals encourage their mark to reach out first by contacting a specified malicious phone number. This tactic more than doubled in popularity during 2025. Callback phishing is effective because it relies heavily on authority bias and a sense of urgency, exploiting people’s tendency to take messages or instructions from people in positions of authority seriously.