IT Week — a critical WordPress flaw exploited within hours, the hidden gold in discarded PCs makes the case for refurbished, and Windows search gets faster

📰 This week's news: a critical WordPress flaw, exploited hours after the patch

On September 22, WordPress released version 7.1.2, fixing CVE-2026-87902 — a critical flaw with a 9.2 out of 10 score on the CVSS scale, the scale used to measure how severe a security vulnerability is. The issue lies in a core WordPress function that decides which theme template to use to render a page (get_page_template()): by exploiting it, an attacker with no account on the site at all can make the server read a PHP file of their choosing, opening the door to remote code execution. The fix was backported all the way to version 4.7 — a 2016 release — a sign of how many years the flaw had sat there unnoticed.

Researchers monitoring attacks in real time report that the first attempts started at 17:44 UTC on September 22 — less than 5 hours after the patch shipped — and that malicious traffic toward WordPress sites jumped 10-fold within a day. Attackers quickly moved from simple reconnaissance (checking which sites are still vulnerable) to writing files to the server capable of running commands — the step that turns a theoretical flaw into an actually compromised site.

The takeaway for anyone running a WordPress site for their business — a showcase site, a blog, an online shop — without thinking about it much day to day: the window between "patch available" and "exploit in the wild" is now measured in hours, not weeks. If the site is managed by an outside provider, there's one question worth asking this week: "are we already on 7.1.2?". If you manage it yourself, check the version under Dashboard → Updates and, if possible, keep core auto-updates turned on.

♻️ The refurbished world: the hidden gold in circuit boards thrown in the trash

Inside every motherboard, every graphics card, every old PC case there's real gold — along with copper and other metals used in electrical contacts because they conduct better than almost anything else. In the US, some startups specializing in recovering these metals from e-waste are making up to $85,000 a day with fully automated plants: the best known, Mint Innovation, separates precious metals from the plastic and other scrap materials in circuit boards.

The number that shows the scale of it is the one estimated for the whole planet: abandoned electronic circuit boards worldwide are thought to still hold between $55 and $60 billion in precious metals waiting to be recovered — boards that end up in landfill instead of a certified processing plant, taking that value with them, unclaimed.

That's why, when a company PC or laptop reaches the end of its life, the right order is always the same: first check whether it can still work for someone else — refurbishment recovers 100% of a device's value, not just the small fraction of metals that can be extracted from it — and only when it truly can't be reused, take it to certified disposal, which first securely and verifiably wipes the data it holds and only then recovers the materials. Throwing it in the wrong bin, or leaving it forgotten in a drawer, means losing both.

🪟 This week's Windows tip: search in "This PC" gets faster

Microsoft has confirmed, on the official Windows 11 Insider blog, that file search started from "This PC" in File Explorer now relies on the system index — the same one used when searching from the File Explorer Home screen — instead of scanning folders live, one by one. The practical result: searches started from "This PC" are much faster, and return results consistent with what you'd see searching from Home.

The change is rolling out in Insider channels (Beta, Experimental, Release Preview) alongside other tweaks to the right-click context menu — including a short tutorial the first time you open it, and the option to turn off its customization entirely from Settings — before reaching everyone in the coming weeks with the September update.

The practical tip, useful right away on any Windows 11 PC — especially a refurbished one that just arrived, where you don't know what the previous owner excluded — is that search speed depends on what Windows keeps indexed. Under Settings → Privacy & security → Windows Search, you can check which folders are included in the index and add the ones you use most (work documents, network folders or secondary drives): if a folder isn't indexed, search stays slow even with this change. See you next week! 🚀