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In a report published June 6, 2016, SecurityWeek, citing FireEye researchers, said Angler’s Flash and Silverlight exploits evaded EMET’s DEP, EAF, and EAF+ mitigations by calling memory-management routines already present in those components. The report describes a specific historical technique—not a universal defeat of EMET or evidence of a current threat.

What the 2016 report said

SecurityWeek’s June 6, 2016 report attributed the analysis to FireEye researchers and described Angler exploits targeting Flash and Silverlight. The researchers reported that the exploits bypassed three EMET protections: Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Export Address Filtering (EAF), and EAF+.

DEP is intended to prevent execution of code from memory regions marked as non-executable. In the reported case, the exploits did not rely on typical return-oriented programming (ROP) to get around DEP. Instead, the researchers said they called memory-management functions already available in the affected software components.

How the reported bypass worked

According to the FireEye analysis reported by SecurityWeek, the Flash exploit used routines in Flash.ocx, while the Silverlight exploit used routines in Coreclr.dll. Those routines called VirtualProtect and VirtualAlloc, Windows functions for changing memory protections and allocating memory. The report said this approach also evaded EAF and EAF+.

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SecurityWeek quoted the researchers: “Since return address validation heuristics are evaded by utilizing these inbuilt functions from within ActionScript and Silverlight Engine, ROP checks by EMET’s DEP capability are not effective,” FireEye researchers explained.

This is the mechanism attributed to the specific Angler case; it should not be treated as an independently reproduced test or a general exploit recipe. Nor does it establish that every Angler exploit, Flash or Silverlight vulnerability, or EMET configuration behaved the same way.

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How this relates to other Angler Flash reports

Microsoft’s separate threat description for Exploit:SWF/Axpergle says Angler-related Flash SWF files attempted to exploit several Adobe Flash vulnerabilities, including CVE-2014-8439, CVE-2015-0310, CVE-2015-0311, and CVE-2015-0313. Microsoft also says the Flash exploit could download and run files. That description provides historical context, but it does not establish that every listed CVE was part of the precise exploit set described in SecurityWeek’s June 2016 article.

EMET protections depended on application configuration

EMET’s protection was not automatic for every application on a system. Microsoft’s security bulletin language described mitigation as conditional on EMET being installed and configured for the relevant application; for example, the bulletin discussed Internet Explorer protection with that qualification. The incident therefore concerns particular exploits and configured defenses, not a blanket test of EMET across all software.

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Microsoft’s 2014 EMET 5.0 announcement also described Attack Surface Reduction (ASR), which could block specified modules or plug-ins and used Flash and Java as examples. ASR is useful context for EMET’s range of controls, but the available report does not identify ASR as the mitigation Angler bypassed in this incident.

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What the report does—and does not—show

  • It shows: FireEye researchers, as reported by SecurityWeek in June 2016, described Flash and Silverlight techniques that evaded DEP, EAF, and EAF+ in EMET.
  • It does not show: that EMET itself had a vulnerability, that all EMET protections were defeated, or that the technique applies to current software.
  • It does not establish: current Angler activity or present-day risk. This is a historical report, and its reference to EMET 5.5 as the latest version was current only at the time of publication.

Microsoft’s November 2016 retrospective said EMET was not integrated into the operating system and that its effectiveness against modern exploit kits had not been demonstrated. That statement reflects Microsoft’s product context in 2016; it is not a current comparison of security products.

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