As we reported yesterday, Microsoft is retiring its EMET security toolkit because it believes it is redundant. The company believes its latest Windows 10 operating system has all the features of EMET, but that doesn't seem to be the case, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CERT vulnerability analysis service.
For seven years, EMET, or Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, has been the go-to security tool for Windows systems that couldn't patch a new flaw but still wanted to protect their network.
EMET provides a range of exploit mitigations that can protect vulnerable systems in various ways, even when a flaw does not exist in any Microsoft product.
However, as we mentioned earlier, Microsoft announced its plans to discontinue EMET, as “Windows 10 includes all mitigation capabilities used by EMET, such as DEP, ASLR, and Control Flow Guard (CFG) together with many other measures to prevent bypasses offered by UAC from exploits targeting the browser “.
Jeffrey Sutherland, a senior manager of the security team of Microsoft's operating system, said that EMET cannot keep up with modern threats and that it is now easy to find “insignificant workarounds” online.
Thus, asserting that customers who used EMET have it built into Windows 10, Microsoft decided to end EMET support after July 31, 2018, and encouraged its customers seeking the best security to move to Windows 10.
However, the vulnerability analyst of the CERT service, Mr. Will Dormann, asked Microsoft to rescind its decision to withdraw EMET, arguing that Windows 10 does not provide the same protection as EMET. Mr. Dormann also noted that Windows 7 that have EMET are better protected than Windows 10 that do not use it.
We should note that the CERT service is a non-profit research center, funded by the Software Engineering Institute research-and-development center that operates from Carnegie Mellon University.
According to the service:
“The EMET library can modify the behavior of the application that is the target of an attack, providing additional protection,” explains Dormann.
“The special protection capabilities application provided by EMET has real value. Because we cannot rely on all software vendors for creating code that stops the exploits that are available, EMET adds this control into our hands.”
When EMET support ends, everyone who uses it will need to watch out for products that will not receive updates from the vendors. Dormann notes that Office 2007, which reaches the end of its support by the end of 2016, will soon belong to this category.
However, consider that all of the above serves Microsoft in releasing new products to the market. It may be somewhat coercive, but we probably have to learn to live with it.
