Microsoft’s EMET 5.0 is Released, Providing Extensive Defense Against Cyber-Attacks

Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit is Microsoft’s second layer of security that was primarily available for enterprise customers, it helps prevent damages against cyber-attacks, and providing methods to detect and block exploitations techniques that are used by cyber criminals. It provides real time protection against such attacks and help secure your system before your formal anti-virus or anti-malware get updates with the patch for such attacks.

EMET is less known by normal users, because it wasn’t much advertised by Microsoft, but now this EMET is free and anyone can use it, even on your home computers, and it gives you extra protection against hackers.

EMET is also compatible with most anti-virus and anti-malware applications, so it can work alongside to provide more security.

Download EMET 5.0 here (11MB)

More details on EMET here.

Google Chrome to Block Local Extensions Installations on Windows

Malicious extensions are real headache for user, such as Ask and few others, they hijack your settings and make changes that are difficult to restore for normal users. Back in October Google added “Reset browser settings” button to recover from such disaster, but malicious extension makers are finding new ways to bypass that.

Google has now announced that from today local extensions installations are no longer allowed in Chrome for Windows. In order to install the extension, it must be hosted on the Chrome Web Store. Google says with this new policy, extensions previously installed not from Chrome Web Store will be automatically disabled.

Developers are not affected by this policy though. They will be able to locally install extensions during development and websites providing extension installation on their own can use inline installs feature.

Source: Google Chrome Blog

Microsoft Adds New Criteria For Adware–Effective from 1st of July, 2014

Microsoft Malware Protection Center is making changes to classify a program as adware. Advertising as become the central source of income even in the tech field, so MMPC is making new criteria to identify them.

The programs that do not follow the new rules will be detected as adware and will be removed from the system immediately.

Here is the new criteria that MMPC is putting forward.

The advertisements that are opened by these programs must:

• Include an obvious way to close the ad.
• Include the name of the program that created the ad.

The program that creates these advertisements must:

• Provide a standard uninstall method for the program using the same name as shown in the ads it produces.

MMPC's new adware policy will come into effect on July 1, 2014, this will gives developers three months to make necessary adjustment their products.

Source: Microsoft MMPC blog