The Enhanced Mitigation Evaluation Tookit (Emet) was announced in July at the BlackHat USA 2010 security conference in Las Vegas.

Emet is designed to help block targeted attacks against unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft platforms such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, as well as third-party or line of business applications.

The tool is aimed at IT professionals to enable them to build in updated protections into applications and processes without recoding or recompiling.

Even with increased community collaboration and information-sharing, online criminals are constantly casing systems and applications for vulnerabilities, said Jerry Bryant, group manager, Trustworthy Computing at Microsoft.

"Added to that, threats are continuing to move up the stack to applications, many of which don't have defense-in-depth mitigations," he said.

Emet is aimed at helping organizations protect their applications from unknown vulnerabilities using security mitigations, said Bryant.

This story was first published by Computer Weekly