At some point in the next few months, Microsoft will start encouraging people to upgrade to Windows 11. If we’re lucky, the company will have learned from its “Get Windows 10” debacle and will not launch a glorified malware application. Regardless of how the company approaches the topic, however, you can bet we’re all going to get blitzed with advertising one way or another.

But that lovely event/hostage-taking is still in the future. For now, Microsoft would appreciate it if everyone stopped downloading the leaked version of Windows 11 that popped up last week. In the process, the OS developer has confirmed what everybody already knew — Windows 11 is, in fact, an official thing that’s happening.

In the future, Weston would like to see ReFirm become part of the certification. “To not only make sure that you’re shipping the device secure, but that it’s being scanned regularly by this ReFirm firmware technology and you’re keeping the firmware up to date.”

Despite the name, ReFirm might not stay restricted to firmware. Microsoft has static and dynamic analysis tools it can add to the product, which Weston compared to VirusTotal’s frequent updates with new analysis options. “I can keep putting layers of tools in that analysis pipeline. I think this has the opportunity to be a VirusTotal-like product that, rather than looking for malware, is looking for vulnerabilities in an arbitrary object. We’re focused on firmware because that seems like the right application, but it could be VM snapshots or many, many other things.”

There’s good news for fans of the open-source Binwalk tool, too. Microsoft will be investing heavily in that, because it’s already widely used by multiple teams across the company who have feature requests, says Weston: “I think we probably have a few years’ worth of backlog ideas already!”

This is the sixth zero day vulnerability to be found in Chrome since the turn of the year and the latest version of Chrome also contains a total of 10 security patches, seven of which are listed as ‘High’ threat with another described as ‘Critical’. To its credit, Google has been consistently quick to release fixes for these flaws with the current fix taking under a week.

If you have been holding off updating your browser, now is the time to put that right. Speaking to BleepingComputer, cyber security vendor Kaspersky warned that a new group of hackers calling themselves ‘PuzzleMaker’ have been successful in hacking both Chrome and Windows this month with Microsoft also issuing an urgent upgrade warning to Windows users.

Kaspersky advises that further undisclosed zero-day hacks in the near future could not be ruled out, so stay alert and make sure both your browser and operating system security are kept up to date.