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Zero-day attacks are extremely dangerous, but very rare, and the main problem is that companies and users simply don't apply critical updates and patches in time, often due to a lack of resources.

Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit for Business (MAEB) defends against these attacks without the need for signatures and their constant update cycles. It wraps key applications in a protective cocoon and watches out for the behavioural characteristics of an attack, using four unique defence layers.

MAEB protects key web browsers, including IE, Firefox and Chrome, browser components such as Java and Flash, Microsoft Office apps, PDF readers, and a range of media players. As it is effectively hardening these apps against attack, it'll work with those new and old - and even OSes no longer supported by Microsoft.

All management, monitoring and reporting is neatly centralised in the MAEB console. Using a Windows Server 2012 R2 host, we installed this component in a few minutes where it also loaded IIS 7.5 Express and an embedded SQL Server Express database.

Client deployment is equally simple: from the console's Admin page, we scanned the lab network and selected the systems to which we wanted the software pushed. IP address ranges or Active Directory OUs can be used, and a neat feature is the option to simulate an install to check your credentials are correct and that all prerequisites have been met.

MAEB uses a lightweight client that's only 3MB in size, so its impact on hosts will be negligible. Usefully, you can also deploy the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware client on selected endpoints and manage it from the same console.

Clients can be placed in different groups, each of these having its own anti-exploit protection policy. Most of the policy tabs are for the Anti-Malware client, with the last two tabs controlling Anti-Exploit client behaviour.

We decided whether users were allowed to interact with the client or even know it existed on their system and select the apps we wanted protected. We could set the client to be automatically upgraded from the management server when new versions are released, define custom apps with their executables and decide which MAEB protection layers should be applied to each app.

The MAEB console home page provides a complete overview of the managed server's status, along with online clients. A bar graph provides a quick view of detected exploits for the past seven days and clicking on it pops up a separate window, showing all of the activity for the last 30 days.

We tested with a number of simple exploits and were impressed with MAEB's reaction times. The client blocked the attacks, popped up a warning message and posted the event in the management console in seconds.

The console provides a good range of graphical reports where we could view a summary of the selected time period, see the top risks and raise a threat trend report. At present, there are no options to export the report contents as a PDF or spreadsheet, but moving to the Clients tab allowed us to see full logs of all thwarted attacks and which systems they occurred on.

Filters, such as usernames, systems and actions, can be applied to refine the information presented. MAEB can also send out email notifications to multiple recipients when an exploit is detected.

During testing, we found MAEB easy to deploy and manage, while its subscription-based pricing scheme looks very good value. The Malwarebytes four-point protection plan is very effective, so network administrators can sleep easy, knowing it's got them covered against zero-day exploits.

Product: Anti-Exploit for Business
Supplier: Malwarebytes
Web site: www.malwarebytes.org
Price: 99 seats per year - £1,777 exc. VAT