Are 95 percent of SAP systems really vulnerable to cyber attack?
Earlier this month, SAP issued a strongly-worded response to claims made by the software vendor Onapsis in a press release that over 95 percent of SAP systems assessed by Onapsis were exposed to vulnerabilities that could lead to the compromise of SAP systems. According to SAP, “The press release published by Onapsis is aimed at alienating SAP customers while promoting Onapsis’ own products. The assertion that over 95% of SAP systems were exposed to vulnerabilities is false.” In spite of such protests, the claims led to a wave of concern over vulnerabilities in SAP systems. The concerns were deepened by the revelation that the data breach at the government contractor USIS reported in 2014 was caused by a vulnerability in an SAP ERP system. The forensic investigators engaged by USIS to review the breach concluded that attackers were able to gain access to the system by exploiting an undisclosed SAP-level vulnerability or series of vulnerabilities. This assertion was based on evidence contained within SAP application trace logs and other sources. The breach led directly to the leakage of highly sensitive information impacting an estimated 25,000 government employees.
Along with similar incidents experienced by the Greek Ministry of Finance and Nvidia, the breach at USIS has served to illustrate the devastating impact to organizations when SAP systems are not securely configured and monitored to guard against possible cyber attack. Since the news of the source of the breach became public, security researchers have put forward several theories of possible exploits that could have been employed by attackers to compromise SAP systems connected to USIS. The theories include the use of default passwords, vulnerabilities in RFC gateways, remote code execution, and even database-level exploits. The fact that the attackers were presented with such an array of possible vectors is disturbing to say the least and highlights the wide attack surface presented by SAP systems.
Unless the specific SAP vulnerability that was exploited to breach USIS was a zero-day exploit, its likely that the breach could have been prevented through the proper hardening of SAP systems, regular patching, and continuous monitoring using tools provided by SAP in Solution Manager. It should be noted that almost all the attack vectors presented by researchers to explain the attack at USIS can be blocked by either applying applicable SAP patches or by observing the relevant SAP security guidance. This also applies to the so-called ‘Top Three Common Cyber Attack Vectors for SAP Systems’ declared by organizations such as Onapsis. Furthermore, once hardened, SAP systems do not necessarily require third party tools to monitor for possible changes or configuration errors that may expose them to cyber threats. The simplest, quickest and most cost-effective strategy is to leverage tools available in Solution Manager. They include System Recommendations for patch management, Change Analysis for detecting and investigating configuration changes, Alerting for security incident and event management, Dashboards for compliance monitoring and finally, Configuration Validation for comprehensive, automated vulnerability management. In short, both the information and the tools you need to secure your SAP systems against the type of attack that breached USIS are available to you at this very moment.