Microsoft this week released Application Guard for Office, a defensive technology that quarantines untrusted Office documents so attack code embedded in malicious files can’t reach the operating system or its applications.

The announcement of Application Guard’s general availability came five months after Microsoft kicked off a public preview of the technology. At that time, Microsoft’s roadmap indicated a December 2020 debut for Application Guard for Office.

“When you’ve enabled Application Guard and a user opens a file from a potentially unsafe location, Office opens the file in Application Guard; a secured, Hyper-V-enabled container isolated from the rest of a user’s data through hardware-based virtualization,” Emil Karafezov, senior program manager, said in a Jan. 27 post to a company blog.

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