Microsoft releases EMET 5.2

Microsoft has released version 5.2 of its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET), a free utility that can detect and block exploitation techniques that are commonly used to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities.

Changes and improvements:

Control Flow Guard: EMET’s native DLLs have been compiled with Control Flow Guard (CFG). CFG is a new feature introduced in Visual Studio 2015 (and supported by Windows 8.1 and Windows 10) that helps detect and stop attempts of code hijacking. EMET native DLLs (i.e. EMET.DLL) are injected into the application process EMET protects. Since Microsoft strongly encourages 3rd party developers to recompile their application to take advantage of this very latest security technology, they’ve compiled EMET with CFG.

VBScript in Attack Surface Reduction: the configuration for the Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) mitigation has been improved to stop attempts to run the VBScript extension when loaded in the Internet Explorer’s Internet Zone. This would mitigate the exploitation technique known as “VBScript God Mode” observed in recent attacks.

Enhanced Protected Mode/Modern IE: EMET now fully supports alerting and reporting from Modern Internet Explorer, or Desktop IE with Enhanced Protected Mode mode enabled.