The company's EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit) 2.0 is a free tool designed to prevent current exploitation techniques used throughout the Internet, the company said. EMET 2.0 is accessible The tool helps to block targeted attacks against unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft, third party, or line of business applications, Microsoft said.

"While EMET can be used by anybody, it is primarily targeted at protecting applications on machines that are at high risk for attack. Good examples include line of business applications on back-end servers and browsers on the desktops of corporate executives. These are scenarios where an application compromise could be particularly damaging," said

Featured in version 2.0 is a new user interface that shows running processes and whether EMET is active for them. Also, the tool adds the following mitigations to applications that do not support them natively:

EMET 2.0 allows customers to opt-in applications via a command line or through a GUI utility. Mitigations can be applied on a per-application and per-process basis. The tool can be updated as new mitigation technologies become available.