MS Access Exploit in the Wild

You may have seen a number of news reports in the past day or two on the active exploitation of a Microsoft Access vulnerability. Here is one story by PC World.

The US-CERT’s current activity Web page, “a regularly updated summary of the most frequent, high-impact types of security incidents currently being reported to the US-CERT,” warned about this active exploitation on December 10.

It is rumored that the vulnerability being exploited is CVE-2007-6026.

Avert Labs is working to find out more. As they say in the press, watch this space!

While we wait, here’s what we know about CVE-2007-6026. It’s a stack overflow in Access. A user would have to open a specially crafted Access database for an attack to take place. Although user assistance is required for exploitation, an exploit could be delivered over various attack vectors, including the Web, e-mail, and IM. Attacks could be coupled with well-establishing social engineering techniques. And now for the rub: This vulnerability is currently unpatched.