Access™ 2007 VBA Programmer's Reference

Chapter 22. Protecting Yourself with Access 2007 Security

Now more than ever, you have to concern yourself with the security of your computer systems. One form of security—securing the information contained in and the intellectual property built into your databases—was discussed in Chapter 18.

Another form of security has to do with preventing malicious attacks on your computers—attacks that can delete files, spread viruses, or otherwise disrupt your work. This chapter focuses on the security enhancements built into Access 2007, which help you protect your computer systems and your users' computer systems.

In Microsoft's efforts to make sure everything is secure, it had to deal with the fact that an Access database has a lot of power (something Access developers have known all along). And because of this power, someone who chooses to use Access maliciously can make an Access database perform destructive operations. In fact, that is the reason that Outlook does not allow Access MDB files to be sent as attachments. From a security perspective, an MDB file is essentially an executable.

To curb this power, Microsoft made changes to Access 2003 that mean that developers must do a little more work to make databases as easy to use as they have been with prior versions of Access. But face it: If your users use Access to open a database from someone else and that database then attacks their computer, they're more likely to blame Access rather than the database they opened. Their confidence ...