How Windows Defender’s New Exploit Protection Works (and How to Configure It)

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Windows has upgraded their security adding exploit protection to the free tools in Windows.

 Excerpt:

"Microsoft’s Fall Creators Update finally adds integrated exploit protection to Windows. You previously had to seek this out in the form of Microsoft’s EMET tool. It’s now part of Windows Defender and is activated by default.

We’ve long recommended using anti-exploit software like Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) or the more user-friendly Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, which contains a powerful anti-exploit feature (among other things). Microsoft’s EMET is widely used on larger networks where it can be configured by system administrators, but it was never installed by default, requires configuration, and has a confusing interface for average users.

Typical antivirus programs, like Windows Defender itself, use virus definitions and heuristics to catch dangerous programs before they can run on your system. Anti-exploit tools actually prevent many popular attack techniques from functioning at all, so those dangerous programs don’t get on your system in the first place. They enable certain operating system protections and block common memory exploit techniques, so that if exploit-like behavior is detected, they’ll terminate the process before anything bad happens. In other words, they can protect against many zero-day attacks before they’re patched.

Windows Defender now includes many of these same protections, which were originally found in Microsoft’s EMET. They’re enabled by default for everyone, and are part of the operating system. Windows Defender automatically configures appropriate rules for different processes running on your system. (Malwarebytes still claims their anti-exploit feature is superior, and we still recommend using Malwarebytes, but it’s good that Windows Defender has some of this built-in now as well.)

This feature is automatically enabled if you’ve upgraded to Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update, and EMET is no longer supported. EMET can’t even be installed on PCs running the Fall Creators Update. If you already have EMET installed, it will be removed by the update.

Much much more with screen shots, good lay person terminology, and related hotlinks in the article here:

https://www.howtogeek.com/329700/how-windows-defenders-new-exploit-protection-works-and-how-to-configure-it/