What is Microsoft’s EMET free security protection tool? Is it for everyone?

[Primero_247]

Microsoft has introduced its new solution against attacks that exploit common security flaws in the applications. Enhanced Mitigation Evaluation Toolkit or EMET allows developers and administrators to enable additional protection of the applications.

The new product differs from the previous applications of the kind in that it does not require programs to be recompiled which means that it protects application seven if there is no source code. Besides, EMET allows specific mitigations to be applied to a particular application process.

Currently EMET is shipping with only four mitigations which include SEHOP, which prevents many structured exception handling exploits; DEP, or data execution prevention, which marks certain parts of process memory as non-executable; NULL page allocation, designed to block NULL dereference exploits in user mode; and heap spray allocation, which pre-allocates certain memory addresses to make it harder for attackers to predict the location of malicious payloads.

The company says that eventually it will add more protections to EMET. The solutions is just another among free security tools Microsoft has released over the past year, including its threat modeling tool, the !exploitable Crash Analyzer and the Microsoft Minifuzz file fuzzer

The application is said to be very good for shops who rely on large amounts of legacy software or commonly used third-party titles that are prone to abuse. Meantime, Microsoft engineers also say that it is not intended for newbies as many applications rely on precisely the behavior the utility is designed to block.