14 DAY TRIAL // The stable version of Malwarebytes Anti-Expoit has been released on Thursday, with the promise to defend computer systems against zero-day exploits.
After the acquisition of ZeroVulnerabilityLabs headed by Pedro Bustamante, Malwarebytes started to build on the new technology under its umbrella.
The product is available in two editions, one free and one paid (Premium - $24.95 / 22.31 EUR). The difference between them is the range of the protection offered, as the Premium one provides options for customizing the shields and features protection capabilities against exploits for Adobe Reader and Acrobat, Foxit Reader, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Also covered by the paid product are web browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera), their add-ons and Java plug-in, which is the only protection available in the free Anti-Exploit.
In order to test the capabilities of the product, Malwarebytes hired the services of security researcher Kafeine. Using various exploits and exploit kits, the analyst concluded that “Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit is working as expected against all widely used exploit kit. It works on Java exploit where Emet wouldn't. This product sounds like a good additional layer against unpatched ("0day") exploit as well even if I have some doubts on his ability to stop Kernel level exploit.”
Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit is not a fool-proof solution against exploits, but it does increase the security level of the computer and protects commonly targeted software against fresh and old exploits.