Control flow guard (http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/64250/ccs05.pdf [2005]) could have prevented this attack. I think most modern programs use stack guards, so this should not be too hard to include either.
"CFI requires that, during program execution, whenever a machine-code instruction transfers control, it targets a valid destination, as determined by a CFG created ahead of time."
That wouldn't do anything for this. If you can change arbitrary bytes of the binary and have it execute, you can rewrite the whole thing, including patching out all these extra checks too.
