Malware developers are crafting new ingenious ways of getting their hands on your data. Unfortunately, users have only had a handful of resources at their disposal to prevent them.
However, on November 10, Microsoft released EMET v5.1, or the Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit as other weapon used to wage the war against malware, hackers and vulnerability exploits.
What does EMET do?
– Microsoft’s Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) adds supplemental security defenses to defend potentially vulnerable legacy and third-party applications. It uses numerous mitigation techniques to prevent exploits related to memory corruption. This is turn makes it more difficult for hackers to find vulnerabilities and exploit them.
What about MACs?
-Yes, there is a program that addresses MAC concerns as well. It is called Little Snitch, and is a network monitor that protects your privacy by monitoring both incoming and outgoing connection attempts to the internet. It asks whether or not a connection can be allowed on a program-by-program basis, and for how long.
In addition to “EMET” and “Little Snitch”, there are a couple other things you can do to tighten security as well.
- Be cautious when opening emails. Never open suspicious emails as they may contains malicious code.
- Uninstall and remove Java. Malware developers are aware that most users religiously update their Java client, and as such design their malware to utilize Java for implementing their attack.
- Don’t download torrents or movies from online. Malware developers are aware that torrent/movie sites are hot sites. Therefore, they set out to infect the sites and/or downloads. As such, you’ll never know that you were attacked until you go to open up the torrent, and your worst fears are realized.
As always, it never hurts to be too cautious when it comes to online security and your data.