BlueHat v17 || Mitigations for the Masses: From EMET to Windows Defender Exploit Guard

Mark Wodrich, Microsoft
Jasika Bawa, Microsoft

In the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, we introduced Windows Defender Exploit Guard (WDEG)—a feature suite that enables you to reduce the attack surface of applications while allowing you to balance security with productivity in a realistic manner. With WDEG's smart attack surface reduction (ASR) rules and exploit protection, we are looking to provide security hardening for popularly used applications without losing sight of the complex environments being managed in most organizations. But what are these security hardening options? And how do we anticipate they will be put to work?

In this talk, we will discuss why and how we embarked upon the WDEG journey, starting all the way from our passionate Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) customers, through the conception of the WDEG feature set, to the internal mechanics behind the rich set of protections it offers. We will also demonstrate how WDEG's smart ASR rules and exploit mitigation settings can be used to reduce the likelihood of exploitation of commonplace legacy applications, now directly from Windows 10.