Malwarebytes has announced the first full public release of Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit, a powerful tool which protects against many zero-day exploits. It’s now available in three editions.

A basic Free version shields some browsers (IE, Chrome, Firefox, Opera), their addons, and Java, on Windows XP or later.

A Premium version ($24.95 for 3 PCs, 1 year) also protects PDF readers (Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat, Foxit Reader); Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and some media players (Windows, VLC, QuickTime, Winamp), as well providing the ability to add or remove custom shields.

Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit mostly just runs in the background, but there’s a small console where you can apply a few tweaks

Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit for Business then takes the program further with remote management and centralised reporting.

All editions have improved on the beta with various new exploit techniques, some small practical changes (automatic upgrading to new versions) and various bug fixes. The official changelog has the details.

Is the technology effective? Unsurprisingly, Malwarebytes says yes, pointing to a (sponsored) blog post with tests showing that Anti-Exploit defeated everything thrown at it. The blogger found it even protected against a Java exploit where Microsoft’s EMET failed, and the only faint issue was some doubt over its ability to stop kernel-level exploits.

And just in case you’re still not excited, Malwarebytes is also offering a chance to win one of 10 Anti-Exploit t-shirts or 10 Anti-Exploit Premium licences.

For us, the core advantage of Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit remains its simplicity. There’s no configuration involved, no bulky signature updates, no conflicts with other antivirus or security tools. It runs on any version of Windows from XP up, uses minimum resources (3.3MB RAM on our system), and for the most part you can forget it’s there: it just works. Go take a look.