[A potential security threat in the Windows Defender driver has been exposed and fixed after 12 years of going unnoticed; the weakness in the Microsoft Defender software was pointed out last November by researchers at security firm SentinelOne. Microsoft finally patched it this week.

According to Wired, the role of the driver in question is essentially to remove malicious files and replace them with placeholder files (albeit unverified files) that could be targets for hackers.SentinelOne's senior security Researcher Kasif Dekel says the software bug "allows privilege escalation and provides administrative privileges to attackers who may attach malware to temporary drivers."

This could easily lead to hackers taking control of your machine, putting hundreds of thousands of users at risk because the software is pre-installed on Windows devices.

The question remains, however, how it went unnoticed for so long.

Because the drivers are not stored locally on the machine and employ what Windows calls "dynamic link libraries," the drivers are only present temporarily when needed.

Thankfully, it is only vulnerable if the attacker already has access to your device, whether remotely or physically.

Try not to panic. It is impossible to discover all bugs before software is released. Be thankful that those pesky hackers were unaware of this bug.

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