Layer Seven, Author at Layer Seven Security

Securing Your Business: Security at SAP

Layer Seven on October 29, 2016

In an open letter addressed to SAP customers earlier this year, SAP CEO Bill McDermott acknowledges the “tremendous concern around information security” given the “relentless and multiplying” threat presented by increasingly sophisticated attackers. The letter introduces the SAP paper Securing Your Business that discusses security trends and outlines SAP’s response to cyber threats.

According to the paper, cyber threats are driven by the growth in the volume of enterprise data, the growing value of data, the increasing connectivity and vulnerability of endpoints, and the commercialization of attacks.

The paper also discusses weaknesses in traditional security technologies such as firewalls and intrusion detection systems that are routinely bypassed by advanced and often encrypted exploits. The paper recognizes that attackers target enterprises systems such as SAP given the extensive and valuable data stored and processed by such systems.

The paper concludes by presenting SAP’s portfolio of products for preventing, detecting and responding to security breaches. This includes Enterprise Threat Detection (ETD), Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and Code Vulnerability Analysis. The paper also cites services and tools available in SAP Solution Manager including SOS and System Recommendations.

Other important areas for security in SAP Solution Manager include Configuration Validation (ConVal). ConVal performs daily, automated scans for hundreds of vulnerabilities in SAP systems and is therefore an important preventative tool for responding to cyber threats. Furthermore, areas such as the monitoring and alerting infrastructure of SAP Solution Manager monitor SAP logs for signs of malicious attacks and generate alerts to warn responders of potential security breaches. Finally, tools such as Usage Procedure Logging, Solution Documentation and Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA) identify application and functional areas impacted by Security Notes to increase the speed of response for SAP patches.

In contrast to many of the products outlined in the paper, SAP Solution Manager is installed in most SAP landscapes and therefore does not require any additional licensing. Contact Layer Seven Security to discuss how to implement advanced security monitoring and respond to cyber threats by optimizing your SAP Solution Manager.

Cybercrime Projected to Reach $2 Trillion by 2019

Layer Seven on October 28, 2016

According to a recent study from Juniper Research, the worldwide cost of data breaches will exceed $2 trillion by 2019. This is equivalent to 2.2% of forecast global GDP and represents a four-fold increase upon data breach costs in 2015. The average cost of data breaches will also increase to $150 million or 25 times the current average of $6 million.

Data breaches are expected to not only intensify in terms of their impact, but also grow more prolific. Globally, there were 6,000 breaches in 2015. This is expected to reach 16,000 by 2020. The increase will be due in part to the growing attack surface caused by the growth in enterprise data. According to IDC, total worldwide enterprise storage capacity will be 521,000 petabytes in 2020.

Presently, approximately 60 percent of data breaches occur in the United States. The proportion is expected to fall to 50 percent by 2020 with the growing digitization of the rest of the world.

Despite the growth in mobile communications and IoT (Internet of Things), the majority of breaches are expected to arise from the exploitation of vulnerabilities in existing IT and network infrastructure rather new and emerging technologies.

The full report is available at Juniper Research. The report provides an in-depth analysis of the current and future threat landscape including sector-by-sector trends and forecasts.

SAP CSO Recommends Solution Manager for Security Monitoring

Layer Seven on September 20, 2016

SAP Chief Security Officer, Justin Somaini, opened the first of a series of five webcasts from the America’s SAP User Group (ASUG) on the topic of SAP security. The series is intended to present SAP’s response to the growing concern over cybersecurity by discussing:

The IT threat landscape and SAP’s approach to strategic security;
Best-practices to safeguard both on-premise and cloud SAP landscapes;
Secure configuration and patch management;
Security for SAP HANA; and
SAP’s security portfolio for responding to internal and external attacks.

During the webcast, Somaini contends security is becoming an important differentiator between competitors in all markets, especially within the technology and manufacturing sector. He also acknowledges that SAP systems often store and process some of the most valuable data within organizations and are therefore particularly at risk from cyber threats. According to Somaini, “the application layer needs to be the first and last line of defence” due to inherent weaknesses in firewalls and other network technologies that cannot protect SAP applications from external threats. In his view, SAP applications should be hardened to build greater resilience against attacks.

Somaini tackles the question of single point versus integrated security solutions by recommending the use of tools that SAP customers already own in platforms such as Solution Manager over a patchwork of external tools. You can view a recording of the webcast and register for other upcoming webcasts in the series by following this link.

Detecting SAP Cyber Attacks with SAP Solution Manager

Layer Seven on September 15, 2016

Despite the $75 billion spent by organizations on security software in 2015, average times to detection for cyber attacks are an astounding 170 days (DBIR, 2016). Most attacks therefore go undetected for almost six months.

An incident response strategy can address this gap by enabling organizations to proactively discover and contain security incidents that could lead to data breaches if left unchecked. The cornerstone of effective incident response is detection. This involves collecting and analyzing information from a variety of sources to identify signs of abnormal events that could include potential malicious actions. SAP systems capture a variety of security-relevant events across multiple logs. The most significant is the Security Audit Log.

The Security Audit Log should be configured to log successful and unsuccessful logon attempts by privileged and standard users, RFC calls, changes to user records, report and transaction starts, and other critical events. This is performed through filters defined in each system. Log data is stored in local or central files that are read by the Security Monitor of the CCMS. This data is available to Solution Manager for centralized alerting.

Solution Manager should be configured to monitor not just events in the Security Audit Log, but also security-relevant events in logs for the gateway server, message server, SAProuter, Web Dispatcher, system log, UME log and, for HANA systems, syslog servers. This captures critical events such as external programs started through the gateway server, external programs registered with the gateway, HTTP requests from remote or unrecognized IPs, and successful/ unsuccessful connections through application gateways.

The Event Calculation Engine (ECE) within Solution Manager continuously monitors event data recorded in such logs to identify potential attacks based on metrics configured for each log source. This is performed using existing data providers such as Diagnostics Agents and sapstartsrv. Both are automatically installed with SAP systems. The monitoring interval for log sources can be customized but the recommended interval is 60 seconds. The ECE can be configured to perform event correlation for sophisticated pattern analysis.

Alerts are triggered by ECE for events that match a defined pattern or exceed thresholds for specific metrics. The alerts are displayed in the Alert Monitor for Solution Manager. Priority levels can be set for each alert based on a High-Medium-Low scale. Alert data also be transferred to Business Warehouse for detailed reporting and analysis using real-time dashboards.

Solution Manager also channels notifications for alerts to designated Incident Responders through email and text message. Notifications can be grouped to avoid alert flooding. Each notification provides a URL to the relevant alert or alert group within Solution Manager. Incident Responders can add comments to the alert in the Alert Monitor, follow guided procedures for handling alerts, and create and assign tickets for incident management within Solution Manager.

The example below displays the alert details and notifications generated by Solution Manager for a failed logon by the standard SAP* user in a monitored system.

1. Attempted logon using SAP* user in client 001 of system PM1.

2. Event summary in the Security Audit log.

3. Event details in the Security Audit Log.

4. Email notification of event.

5. The email attachment for the alert notification.

6. The Alert Inbox in SAP Solution Manager

7. The details of the alert in the Alert Monitor

SAP Security Notes – August 2016

Layer Seven on September 2, 2016

Note 2319506 addresses a blind SQL injection vulnerability in Database Monitors for Oracle. The vulnerability impacts all versions of SAP Basis and rates extremely high on the impact scale using the common vulnerability scoring system. Content-based and time-based blind SQL injection is used by attackers to determine when input is interpreted as a SQL statement. The results are used to fingerprint databases, build database schemas and escalate attacks.

The blind SQL injection vulnerability in the Database Monitors is caused by improper validation of user-supplied input in the function modules STUO_GET_ ORA_SYS_ TABLE and STUO_GET_ORA_SYS_TABLE_ 2. The modules are used to read Oracle system tables containing sensitive data including database instances and logical names for database connections. Corrections for the vulnerability are included in support packages for relevant SAP Basis versions detailed in Note 2311011.

Note 2313835 deals with a high risk denial of service vulnerability in the Internet Communication Manager (ICM). The ICM manages client-server communication using Web protocols such as HTTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. For NetWeaver Application Server Java, the ICM also manages communications based on the proprietary SAP P4 protocol. Note 2313835 provides kernel patches for DOS and DDOS attacks targeted at the P4 port of AS Java that could lead to service disruptions caused by resource exhaustion.

Note 2142551 delivers a framework for protecting AS ABAP against clickjacking attacks. This includes a client-dependent positive whitelist maintained in the HTTP_WHITELIST table. The key data to be maintained for each entry in the whitelist is entry_type and host. The recommended value setting for entry_type is 30 to enable clickjacking protection. Trusted hosts and domains should be defined in the host field.

Note 2012284 provides corrections to extend virus scanning to objects created by Knowledge Provider, a document and content management service within NetWeaver Application Servers.

7 Reasons You Should Upgrade to SolMan 7.2

Layer Seven on August 2, 2016

SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) is the epicenter of SAP implementations and the standard for monitoring and maintaining SAP landscapes. The general availability of release 7.2 in August is expected to deliver major advances in seven specific areas.

The first is support for managing the implementation lifecycle of HANA and S/4HANA. SolMan 7.2 is optimized to not only manage HANA systems but also run directly on HANA. Licenses for HANA are bundled with SAP maintenance contracts and are therefore effectively free for SolMan 7.2.

The second is support for hybrid systems. SolMan 7.1 SP13 or lower is directed primarily at ABAP and Java systems. However, SolMan 7.2 will extend support for monitoring both cloud and on-premise environments including SuccessFactors.

The third is an improved user experience through SAP Fiori. The Fiori launchpad provides a simple and graphical interface and replaces the work centers available in release 7.1. Dashboards have been migrated from Adobe Flash to the SAPUI5 (HTML5). Since HTML5 can be rendered on any device, SolMan no longer needs Android and iOS apps to support mobile users. The Fiori Launchpad enables users to personalize their screens to include access to other applications (see below).

The fourth is a wider array of application and cross-application dashboards for monitoring metrics such as system security, changes, events, incidents, availability and performance. Customers can also leverage custom dashboards using predefined templates available from Focused Insights. This includes dashboards for monitoring not just technical but business metrics. Focused Insights include over 800 best practices KPIs that can be deployed in minutes without programming.

The fifth is an enhanced Custom Code Management application to enable customers to optimize the quality, performance and security of custom developments. This includes governance models to identify custom code in system landscapes and tools such as UPL and SCMON to track the usage of custom code. Usage data can be used to decommission idle code to lower the attack surface for custom developments and reduce the scope of testing during system upgrades or enhancements.

The sixth is tighter integration between the Test Suite and solution documentation, enabling customers to focus testing on business processes impacted by proposed changes. This is performed using Business Process Change Analyzer (BPCA). BPCA leverages the inventory of business processes in solution documentation and Technical Bills of Materials (T-BOMs) for executables within processes.

SolMan 7.2 enables users to record and replay test scripts to automate testing using Component-Based Test Automation (CBTA). These and other applications for creating and maintaining test plans, scripts, and results including defects are accessed through the Test group in the SAP Fiori Launchpad.

The seventh and final reason for upgrading to SolMan 7.2 is that SAP cannot extend the deadline for ending maintenance for release 7.1 beyond December 31, 2017. Customers have a relatively short window to upgrade to release 7.2. The Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) is mandatory for all operations in SolMan 7.2. Therefore, MAI must be enabled in SolMan 7.1 before any upgrade. A stack split is performed during the upgrade procedure. Database migration to SAP HANA can also be performed during the upgrade. Detailed information is available in Notes 2161244, 2045230 and 2045342.

To discuss how Layer Seven Security can support your Solution Manager 7.2 implementation or upgrade projects, contact us here.

Three Reasons You Should Budget for SAP Breach Costs

Layer Seven on June 28, 2016

The average cost of a data breach has now surpassed $4 million. This is according to the latest study from the Ponemon Institute issued earlier this month. The study surveyed 383 organizations in 12 countries. It revealed that not only are data breach costs increasingly across the board, the probability that organizations will suffer a breach impacting 10,000 or more records is 25 percent.

The global results mask significant differences between countries and industries. For example, average data breach costs are highest in the U.S ($7M) and sectors such as healthcare, education and financial services. However, regardless of country or industry, the majority of breaches (48%) are caused by cyber attacks rather than human error or system glitches.

The results of the Ponemon study are contested by the report Beneath the Surface of a Cyberattack from Deloitte Advisory. According to the report, actual costs are far higher than indicated by the Ponemon study which focuses upon measuring direct and tangible costs for breach notification, forensic investigations, legal fees, public relations, regulatory fines and other areas. Deloitte estimate that such costs account for less than 5% of the total business impact of data breaches. The strategic impact of breaches in terms of increased insurance premiums, loss of intellectual property, reputational harm and other hidden costs is far higher than the direct impact. This is illustrated by a breach of patient records experienced by a healthcare company cited in the report. Only 3.5% of the $1.6 billion lost by the company as a result of the breach was associated with direct costs.

Both of the studies echo the results of an earlier report from the Ponemon Institute that placed the average cost of data breaches impacting SAP systems at $4.5M. The report also revealed that 65% of companies had experienced one or more SAP breach within the last 2 years. The significant impact of data breaches and the likelihood that organisations will experience a breach if they haven’t already done so suggests that breach costs should be planned and budgeted. However, aside from region, sector and other factors, there are three reasons that could negatively impact the extent your organization budgets for SAP breach costs. The reasons are outlined below.

1. You do not effectively identify, prioritize and apply security patches for SAP systems

The majority of exploits for SAP systems do not target zero-day vulnerabilities. Most exploits focus upon long-standing and well-known vulnerabilities that can be removed by regularly upgrading SAP systems and applying Security Notes provided by SAP. A case in point is the invoker servlet vulnerability addressed by the recent alert issued by US-CERT. This vulnerability was disclosed in 2010 and addressed by several Notes issued by SAP in the same year.

2. You do not effectively manage vulnerabilities in SAP systems

SAP systems can present a wide attack surface to attackers if they are poorly configured and monitored. A comprehensive vulnerability management program for SAP systems should include continuously monitoring and removing vulnerabilities in areas such as remote function calls, gateway servers, message servers, client-server and server-to-server communication, password policies, session management, audit settings, ICF services, UME settings, Java services and user privileges.

3. You do not effectively discover and respond to malicious events in SAP systems

SAP systems include a wide array of logs that should be continually monitored for indicators of a potential attack. This includes events such as logons or attempted logons with standard users, changes to RFC destinations, ICF services or global settings, trusted system logons, RFC callbacks, path traversals and suspected XSRF attacks. Alerts for such events should be triggered and automatically transmitted to incident response teams to ensure attacks are blocked and contained.

Customers that implement strong patch, vulnerability and threat management programs for SAP systems can justifiably budget far less for SAP breach costs that those that do not by reducing both the likelihood and impact of a potential breach. In fact, they may be able to remove the need to budget for breach costs altogether and rely upon on cyber insurance by satisfying the due diligence requirements of cyber insurance policies.

Customers that haven’t Implemented patch, vulnerability and threat management capabilities can address the gap by leveraging standard tools available in SAP Solution Manager without licencing third party software. This includes System Recommendations for patch management, Configuration Validation for vulnerability management and E2E Alerting for threat management. Layer Seven Security empower customers to unlock the capabilities of SAP Solution Manager for automated vulnerability scanning and security alerting. To learn more, contact Layer Seven Security.

Security in SAP HANA

Layer Seven on May 30, 2016

SAP HANA is now deployed by over 7,500 organizations worldwide. While this represents only a fraction of the 300,000 companies that use SAP software globally, adoption is growing rapidly, doubling in 2015 alone. As expected, the introduction of SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (S/4HANA) has accelerated this growth by widening the use-case for SAP HANA from analytics to transactional processing for core business processes.

While the performance and administrative benefits of SAP HANA are clear-cut, the benefits for security are more questionable. Unlike conventional persistent databases, HANA does not provide any native capability for label-based access control, data discovery and classification, data redaction and masking, or database firewalls. HANA also presents an architectural challenge for security engineers since some implementation scenarios integrate application and database layers that are traditionally hosted in separate physical or virtual servers.

SAP has addressed some of these concerns in later releases of HANA. SPS 12 includes features to isolate databases in multi-tenant environments to prevent cross-database attacks. It also includes more advanced logging capabilities to support multiple log formats and fine-grained audit policies. This is discussed in the newly updated whitepaper Security in SAP HANA, available in the resources section. The whitepaper provides a framework for securing HANA systems including network security, authentication and authorization, encryption for data in transit and at rest, and OS-level security for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLES) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

HANA vulnerabilities such as potential misconfigurations in database parameters or users with special privileges should be monitored using SAP Solution Manager (SolMan). In common with other SAP systems, HANA is connected to and monitored by SolMan. Security-relevant data is extracted by agents from HANA and transmitted to SolMan for analysis. SolMan analyzes the data using rulesets to identify potential vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers. The results are accessible through BW or BI including Lumira and Crystal Reports.

Rulesets benchmarked against best practices and SAP recommendations can be licensed from Layer Seven Security and imported directly into your Solution Manager platforms. To learn more, contact us.

US-CERT Issues Alert for SAP Invoker Servlet Vulnerability

Layer Seven on May 12, 2016

US-CERT published an alert yesterday to warn SAP customers of the dangers posed by the invoker servlet vulnerability in AS Java systems. According to the alert, there is evidence to suggest that SAP systems at 36 organizations have been exploited by the vulnerability. The organizations are based in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, China, India, Japan, and South Korea, and operate in industries that include oil & gas, telecommunications, utilities, retail, automotive and the pubic sector.

The invoker servlet vulnerability arises when servlets can be called directly either by servlet name or by fully-qualified class name. This can be exploited to bypass authentication and authorization rules defined in the web.xml files of Java applications. In the cases referenced by the US-CERT alert, attackers appeared to have exploited the invoker servlet to call a Java component that enabled them to execute OS commands and create user accounts in SAP systems.

The vulnerability was patched by SAP in 2010. SAP also modified the default configuration of AS Java to disable the invoker servlet in versions 7.20 and later. Corrections were provided in Notes 1445998 and 1467771. The evidence of the active exploitation of the invoker servlet vulnerability five years after the underlying flaw was patched by SAP demonstrates that the greatest risk posed to SAP systems is the exploit of known weaknesses rather than so-called zero-day vulnerabilities.

The invoker servlet should be disabled at a global level by setting the EnableInvokerServletGlobally key to false. The key is located in the global properties of each J2EE instance. You can follow the three steps below to discover systems in your landscape vulnerable to the exploit using SAP Solution Manager.

1. Create a target system in Configuration Validation to check the value of the key for all systems using the servlet_jsp store. See below.

2. Edit the target system by removing all parameters in the servlet_jsp store except EnableInvokerServletGlobally. Set the value for the key to true and maintain the weight/ info. See below.

3. Run the weighted validation report for all Java systems and review the results of systems with the EnableInvokerServletGlobally set to true. See below.

The invoker servlet vulnerability is one of the 500+ checks performed by security rulesets provided by Layer Seven for ABAP, Java, HANA, and database systems. The rulesets can be imported into your Solution Manager systems in seconds to perform daily automated scans for vulnerabilities in SAP systems. To learn more, contact Layer Seven Security.

How to Visualize Cyber Security Risks in Your Systems with SAP Lumira

Layer Seven on April 28, 2016

SAP Lumira can be used to access, visualize and explore data of any size from virtually any source. It enables users to build and share powerful interactive data visualizations using a simple user-friendly interface. Since Lumira can acquire data and enable users to create customized reports through self-service, it removes the need for programming, scripting and any other form of development.

This article demonstrates how you can use Lumira to visualize security vulnerabilities in your SAP systems and overcome limitations with standard Business Warehouse (BW) reports. The demonstration is based on the Standard Edition of Lumira, available at the SAP Store. This edition will operate with minimal hardware requirements from any system with a Windows 7 or higher operating system.

After Lumira is installed, you will need to add the BW data connector using the Extension Manager since the data source is underlying BW reports in Solution Manager (SolMan). The reports store the results of automated security reviews performed by SolMan. The next step is to set the connection to the BW server in SolMan under Network in the Preferences section. This includes the server URL, hostname, instance and user credentials required for the connection.

Once the connection is established, you can define the variables including reference systems, comparison systems, stores, items and fields. This covers the security policies setup in SolMan, the systems that are mapped for monitoring, and the containers that store the results of the security reviews. We recommend creating a separate Lumira report for each security policy based on different system types (ABAP, Java, HANA, etc.).

You can begin building your visualization and exploring security vulnerabilities as soon as the data is acquired by Lumira. In the report below, we have created charts and tables that convey security vulnerabilities discovered using SolMan by area, system and risk level.

The results can be filtered by any of these elements. The tables provide details of each finding including the objectives of every check, recommendations to remove vulnerabilities, links to relevant SAP Security Notes, and information available at the SAP Help Portal. The reports can be exported to PDF, CSV or Excel. They can also be shared via URLs with users or groups defined in Lumira.

SAP Lumira can be used to visualize not only security vulnerabilities discovered by Solution Manager but also unapplied Security Notes in SAP systems. See below.

To learn more or to discuss how we can assist your organization leverage the full capabilities of SAP Lumira for dynamic, cost-effective and real-time security monitoring, contact Layer Seven Security.