14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft will pull the plug on its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (also known as EMET) on July 31, 2018 (an extension to the original end-of-support date set for January 27, 2017), but this isn’t at all a good move, a security institute says.
The CERT group at Carnegie Mellon University explains that EMET helped make Windows 7 very secure and, in some cases, even more secure than Windows 10, so pulling it means that users who are not running the latest operating system would be left vulnerable.
While they admit that Windows 10 indeed integrates some of the features available in EMET, a Windows 7 system that has the toolkit installed can prove to be more secure because with a built-in solution, it all comes down to apps to integrate these security features.
“Microsoft strongly implies that if you are running Windows 10, there is no need for EMET anymore. This implication is not true. The reason it's not true is that Windows 10 does not provide the application-specific mitigations that EMET does,” security researchers explain.
Windows 10 and EMET, the best possible combo
A graph comparing the security features of Windows 7 with EMET and Windows 10 with the built-in technologies shows that the 2009 operating system is actually more secure, coming with features that are not available on its 2015 successor.
The best combo is Windows 10 and EMET, which according to these experts, provides the best security that you can get right now on Windows.
“Microsoft strongly implies that if you are running Windows 10, there is no need for EMET anymore. This implication is not true. The reason it's not true is that Windows 10 does not provide the application-specific mitigations that EMET does. Windows 10 does not provide all of the mitigation features that EMET administrators have come to rely on,” the report shows.
Microsoft is yet to offer a statement on this, but the company is very unlikely to change the end-of-support date for EMET. Windows 7 support itself is coming to an end in January 2020, so Microsoft probably doesn’t see a reason to keep EMET alive for too long, especially because it’s working on implementing its full functionality in Windows 10.