Microsoft, kings of buggy software, have just patched a bug in their Windows operating systems which was discovered by a Google techie – except this one was almost old enough to drink legally.

The 17 year old bug is in the NTVDM piece of software, responsible for allowing old MS-DOS based programs to function in the Windows NT, XP, Vista and 7 lines of OSes produced by Microsoft.

Why this bug has taken so long to locate, and whether it is a genuine security risk these days is a mystery, only that it has indeed existed since Windows NT 3.1 and is still present in the most modern versions of Windows.

Now I’m no Microsoft basher, but surely it should have been detected by someone inside their organisation long before now, not some Google security analyst in 2010?