Today, we’re releasing the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) 5.2, which includes increased security protections to improve your security posture. You can download EMET 5.2 from microsoft.com/emet or directly from here. (We are having an issue with the EMET page on the Microsoft Download Center, so the link points to the EMET 5.2 installer directly - we'll the link once it is resolved.)

Following is the list of the main 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 we strongly encourage 3rd party developers to recompile their application to take advantage of this very latest security technology, we have compiled EMET with CFG. More information on CFG are available at this Visual C++ Team blog entry.
  • 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.

Your feedback is always welcome, as it helps us improve EMET. Feel free to reach out to us by sending an email to emet_feedback@microsoft.com.

- The EMET Team