IT Week — Windows patches 400 security flaws, Dell bets on refurbished for back-to-school, and two new File Explorer tricks

📰 News of the week: 400 flaws closed, one already in criminals' hands

With August 2026's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft fixed 400 vulnerabilities across Windows and its products, 42 of them rated critical — 37 Remote Code Execution bugs and 5 elevation-of-privilege flaws. Across all 400, 110 are RCE and 176 allow an attacker to gain higher privileges than intended on the targeted system: heavy numbers, even by this year's already-high standards.

Of the three zero-days fixed, one stands out: CVE-2026-68820, in Windows' AFD.sys networking component, was already being actively exploited — researchers point to the North Korean hacking group Lazarus. The other two, CVE-2026-62832 and CVE-2026-72971, had already been publicly disclosed before the fix, meaning they were known to attackers too.

The update is called KB5121003 (build 26200.9168 for Windows 11 25H2, 26100.9168 for 24H2) and has been downloading and installing itself via Windows Update for days now, unless that's been turned off. For a business or a professional, the standard advice for an already-exploited flaw still applies: don't wait for the next scheduled maintenance window, install it as soon as you can.

♻️ Refurbished world: the biggest back-to-school discount is on refurbished

For the 2026 back-to-school season, the Dell Refurbished Store — Dell's own official channel for reselling its refurbished laptops — rolled out an extra 40% off any laptop, running through August 24. Latitude-line models (3340, 3440, 3540, 5340) start at $819, with Intel Core i3 to i7 processors, 8-32 GB of RAM and 256-512 GB SSDs: off-lease systems returned from corporate leasing contracts, restored to the manufacturer's own standards and backed by a 100-day Dell warranty.

It's no isolated case: the latest estimates put the global refurbished electronics market at $74.8 billion in 2025, growing at an average 11.3% a year to reach $237.2 billion by 2036 — more than tripling in a decade. Among the drivers cited: demand for affordable alternatives to new electronics (which keeps getting pricier, memory costs included), and growing environmental awareness around cutting electronic waste.

The link to the seller of new hardware is no coincidence here either: when a manufacturer with revenues in the hundreds of billions builds an entire official channel around refurbished, backed by its own warranty, that's the market telling you it's a product in its own right, not a fallback. It's the same principle we've worked on since 2006: extending the working life of business IT with certified data erasure, instead of always buying new.

🪟 The Windows tip: two shortcuts that arrived with the latest update

The same KB5121003 we mentioned above, besides the security fixes, also brings a couple of practical improvements to File Explorer — small ones, but the kind you notice every day once you know they're there.

First: file sizes now show in the right unit — KB, MB or GB — instead of always being displayed in kilobytes like before, when a 2 GB file showed up as a barely-readable seven-digit number. Nothing to turn on: once the update is installed, File Explorer's "Size" column switches on its own.

The second is more hidden but just as handy: in the address bar or on File Explorer's Home page, middle-clicking a folder opens it straight in a new tab, no right-click and hunting through the menu needed. Useful on a refurbished office PC where you're often working across several folders at once.

Not sure you already have the update? Settings → Windows Update, turn on "Get the latest updates as soon as they're available" and hit "Check for updates". Doubly worth it this week, given the flaws above. See you next week! 🚀