, for longer than Malwarebyes Anti-Exploit has been available. Microsoft has been providing a free tool known as EMET, or the Quickly Secure Your Computer With Microsoft's Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) It only affects those specific applications, so it won’t slow down or interfere with anything else on your system. Technically, MBAE works by injecting its DLL into these protected applications, as you can see with This allows it to stop new attacks before signatures are created or patches are created. This doesn’t use a signature database like an antivirus program - it hooks into certain vulnerable programs and just protects against potentially harmful behavior. Other protections help stop buffer overflows and other nasty, but common, techniques used by malware. If Chrome or the Flash plug-in try to start writing to files they never should, they can be instantly terminated. It also watches an application and stops it if it behaves in a way that doesn’t seem appropriate to its type of application.įor example, if Internet Explorer decides to start using the CreateProcess API function in Windows, this tool can notice it’s doing something unusual and stop it. In addition to ensuring DEP and ASLR are enabled for that application on a 64-bit operating system, the tool stops techniques used bypass operating system security protections as well as malicious API calls. They note “four layers” of protection enabled by Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit. Three big Flash zero-days near the start of 2015. It’s a good form of defense against all these
Every Windows user can get additional protection against the main attacks online - browser and plug-in exploits - and should install this.
But the free version does shield Adobe Reader as long as it’s loaded as a browser plug-in.)Īnti-exploit programs can help protect you from serious attacks, and Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit offers a good free version, is easy to set up - just install it - and provides solid protection.
(If you’re using the free version, this is a good reason to just use the PDF viewer built into your browser. The paid version shields more applications, including the Adobe PDF reader and Microsoft Office applications. The free version shields web browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and their plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight, as well as Java.