Microsoft Security Response Center

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to prepare the target environment to improve exploit reliability.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to win a race condition.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.

**According to the CVSS metric, user interaction is required (UI:R). What interaction would the user have to do?** The user would have to click on a specially crafted URL to be compromised by the attacker.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is local (AV:L). Why does the CVE title indicate that this is a remote code execution?** The word **Remote** in the title refers to the location of the attacker. This type of exploit is sometimes referred to as Arbitrary Code Execution (ACE). The attack itself is carried out locally. For example, when the score indicates that the **Attack Vector** is **Local** and **User Interaction** is **Required**, this could describe an exploit in which an attacker, through social engineering, convinces a victim to download and open a specially crafted file from a website which leads to a local attack on their computer.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is adjacent (AV:A). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** This vulnerability's attack is limited at the protocol level to a logically adjacent topology. This means it cannot simply be done across the internet, but instead needs something specific tied to the target. Good examples would include the same shared physical network (such as Bluetooth or IEEE 802.11), logical network (local IP subnet), or from within a secure or otherwise limited administrative domain (MPLS, secure VPN to an administrative network zone). This is common to many attacks that require machine-in-the-middle (MITM) type setups or that rely on initially gaining a foothold in another environment.

**What privileges could be gained by an attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability?** An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack complexity is high (AC:H). What does that mean for this vulnerability?** Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to take additional actions prior to exploitation to prepare the target environment.

**According to the CVSS metric, the attack vector is network (AV:N) and the user interaction is required (UI:R). What is the target context of the remote code execution?** An authenticated victim who is connected to the network must be tricked or persuaded to connect to a malicious SQL database using their SQL client application. After the connection is made, the server can send specially crafted replies to the client that exploit the vulnerability and permit execution of arbitrary code within the context of the user's SQL client application.