Microsoft recently made available for download, the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit 4.0. EMET is a tool that helps prevent vulnerabilities in installed software from being exploited by malware and malicious processes. This is achieved with the help of security mitigation technologies, which function as special protections and obstacles that an exploit author must defeat to exploit software vulnerabilities.
Today, software vulnerabilities and exploits have become a part of life, what with vulnerabilities being found in every commonly used software every other day. Security mitigation technologies can help keep you protected even before the updates are released by the software vendors, as they make it more difficult for an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities. It basically does this by letting users force applications to use key security defenses like
Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and
Data Execution Prevention (DEP). You can use it to protect Microsoft as well as Non-Microsoft applications.
The recently released EMET 4.0, also provides a configurable SSL/TLS certificate pinning feature that is called Certificate Trust. This feature is intended to detect
man-in-the-middle attacks that are leveraging the
public key infrastructure (PKI).
Once you have downloaded and installed the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, you will see a wizard. You have to configure its settings by providing the name and location of the executable file that you want to protect. If you go in for the default recommended settings, then most common programs like Internet Explorer, Oracle Java, Microsoft Office, Adobe, etc. will be protected.
You can download Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit 4.0 from the
Microsoft Download Center. The download also contains a PDF User Guide, which will be very helpful if you plan to deploy EMET on your Windows system.
