The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a federal law in the United States that establishes minimum standards for securing Protected Health Information (PHI) including electronic PHI (ePHI). It applies to all organizations that store, process or transmit PHI for U.S citizens.
PHI includes specific personal and health identifiers such as names, email addresses, telephone numbers, significant dates such as dates of birth, social security numbers, medical record numbers, biometric information, and photographic images. While HIPAA is specific to U.S citizens, many other countries have enacted similar rules to safeguard health information. For example, countries in the European Union must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to protect health-related personal data. Canadian organizations are covered by the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) that deals with the protection of personal information that includes health-related information.
HIPAA standards are defined in three separate Rules for Privacy, Security, and Breach Notification. The Privacy Rule applies to PHI. The Security Rule includes measures to protect the confidentiality, availability and integrity of ePHI. The Breach Notification Rule outlines reporting and disclosure requirements in the event of a breach of PHI or ePHI. Violations of the requirements of the rules can result in fines and civil penalties. Furthermore, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) is empowered to conduct periodic audits of organizations to confirm compliance with HIPAA standards.
The Security Rule details 18 standards compromised of 42 specifications that organizations must comply with to protect ePHI from unauthorized access, modification or disclosure. This includes technical safeguards for authentication, access control, data transmission, encryption and auditing. The technical safeguards apply to all solutions handling ePHI. This can include SAP solutions.
The OCR issued a notice for proposed updates to the HIPAA Security Rule in December last year. The updates are intended to address current and emerging cyber threats. The changes include removing the distinction between required and “addressable” standards. This was used by some organizations to evade compliance. The revised Security Rule will limit exemptions.
The new Security Rule will also mandate vulnerability assessments every 6 months, penetration tests every 12 months, and annual compliance audits. Organizations will need to ensure the timely implementation of security patches and software updates by implementing critical patches within 15 days and high priority patches within 30 days. The Rule will also require the implementation of specific measures for encrypting data at rest and in transit, multi-factor authentication, anti-malware protection, and minimizing the attack surface for information systems. Organizations will also be required to implement technology to support real-time monitoring and incident response for systems.
The public comment period for the proposed changes to the Security Rule closed earlier this month. The OCR will review all 4,745 comments submitted by organizations and experts. There is currently no timeline for the implementation of the new Security Rule. However, the changes have bipartisan support and therefore are likely to be rolled out soon. Once the updated Rule takes effect, organizations are expected to have 180 days to comply with the new requirements.
The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP automates compliance audits for the technical safeguards of the HIPAA Security Rule. It detects compliance gaps for SAP solutions related to authentication, access control, unapplied security patches, auditing and other standards in HIPAA. The solution also supports compliance assessments for other security frameworks including GDPR, PCI-DSS and NIST, as well as SAP security standards such as the SAP Security Baseline, the S/4HANA Security Guide, and SAP Enterprise Cloud Services requirements for SAP RISE.
The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP performs threat detection for SAP solutions including alerting for suspected security breaches. Alerts can be investigated and reported using built-in incident response procedures. This supports compliance with security monitoring requirements and the Breach Notification Rule of HIPAA.
Security notes are released by SAP on the second Tuesday of every month to address vulnerabilities in SAP solutions. The vulnerabilities are discovered by external security researchers and reported as part of SAP’s disclosure program. They are also discovered directly by SAP through its’s ongoing research and testing. Security notes are scored by SAP using version 3.0 of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVSS generates a score from 0 to 10 based on the severity of the vulnerability. SAP also assigns a priority level for each note. Critical notes are categorized as hot news.
There were over 150 security notes released in 2024 to address vulnerabilities in SAP solutions. The average CVSS score was 5.9. Approximately 1 in 4 of the notes were categorized as hot news or high priority. This article reviews the most important security notes of 2024, based on CVSS score. Hot news notes should be prioritized for implementation. Often, workarounds included in some notes can be applied to mitigate risks if the corrections cannot be applied immediately.
Note 3479478 [CVE-2024-41730] is the one of the highest rated notes of 2024 with a CVSS score of 9.8. The note patches a missing authentication check in SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Platform (BOBJ). The vulnerability can be exploited by attackers to compromise logon tickets using a REST endpoint if Single Sign-On is enabled. The property Trusted_Auth_Shared_Secret can be set to Disabled in the effected files to mitigate the vulnerability if BOBJ cannot be upgraded to the required patch level immediately.
Note 3455438 also has a CVSS score of 9.8. The note addresses code injection and remote code execution vulnerabilities in open-source components bundled in SAP CX Commerce. This includes API tools in Swagger UI and database drivers in Apache Calcite Avatica. The solutions referenced in the note remove the vulnerable components in Swagger UI and upgrade Apache Calcite Avatica to the recommended version. There are no workarounds.
Note 3448171 patches CVE-2024-33006 for a critical file upload vulnerability in SAP NetWeaver Application Server ABAP (AS ABAP). The CVE is rated 9.6. The vulnerability can be exploited to bypass malware scanning and completely compromise SAP systems. The correction and workaround detailed in the note apply signature checks for the FILESYSTEM and SOMU_DB content repositories. The vulnerability impacts most version of the SAP_BASIS component in AS ABAP.
Note 3425274 [CVE-2019-10744] patches a code injection vulnerability in SAP Build Apps. The vulnerability arises from specific versions of the Lodash open-source JavaScript library used for programming tasks included in SAP Build Apps. Applications should be rebuilt with version 4.9.145 or later to prevent the vulnerability.
SAP Build Apps is also vulnerable to CVE-2024-29415, a severe Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability detailed in note 3477196.
Note 3536965 [CVE-2024-47578] addresses SSRF and information disclosure vulnerabilities in Adobe Document Services of SAP NetWeaver AS for JAVA (AS Java). Updating the ADSSAP software component to the recommended patch level will remove the vulnerabilities in the relevant web applications and services in AS Java.
Note 3433192 [CVE-2024-22127] deals with a code injection vulnerability in the Administrator Log Viewer plug-in of AS Java. The vulnerability requires administrative privileges for successful exploitation. Therefore, restricting the use of the Administrators role can mitigate the vulnerability.
Note 3420923 [CVE-2024-22131] patches a vulnerable RFC service in AS ABAP to prevent a critical code injection vulnerability. The workaround in the note recommends restricting access to function modules for CA-SUR using authorization object S_RFC.
Other important notes include 3413475 for multiple CVEs in SAP Edge Integration Cell and 3412456 [CVE-2023-49583] which addresses an escalation of privileges vulnerability in node.js applications created using SAP Business Application Studio, SAP Web IDE Full-Stack or SAP Web IDE for SAP HANA.
SAP Enterprise Threat Detection (ETD) is the premier solution from SAP for identifying and responding to cyber attacks in SAP applications. ETD collects and analyzes log data from SAP systems and uses predefined patterns to detect Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and trigger alerts for suspected security incidents. ETD includes graphical tools to support log analysis and detailed forensic investigation. Users can also create and publish custom patterns and alerts.
In addition to identifying potential threats, SAP ETD monitors the implementation status of required security notes in SAP solutions. Users can review the details of relevant notes including CVSS information and maintain the processing status of each note.
Anomaly detection is also supported by SAP ETD. The solution includes several patterns for anomalies, defined as events that deviate from normal or usual behavior in system landscapes.
ETD is a powerful solution capable of detecting and responding to cyber threats against SAP solutions in real time. It is available as an on-premise or cloud deployment, and can even be licensed as a managed service.
However, there are several drawbacks with SAP ETD, especially in comparison to alternative solutions available from SAP partners.
Unlike solutions such as the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP that use an addon approach to implementing advanced threat and response for SAP applications, ETD requires additional servers and infrastructure to host required components including SAP HANA, Kafka, Zookeeper, and streaming tools. This leads to more complex installation and maintenance procedures compared to software addons that can be installed and maintained in existing systems within SAP landscapes with comparatively low effort.
ETD is also bundled with relatively few attack detection patterns. The most current version and support package level of the on-premise edition of ETD includes approximately 175 patterns. The cloud edition of ETD provides fewer than 50 patterns. The recent release of the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP delivers far more coverage with over 1000 built-in patterns.
Furthermore, although ETD is capable of monitoring SAP infrastructure including third party databases and operating systems, standard patterns in ETD include very few patterns for the database and OS layer. In contrast, the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP includes hundreds of patterns not only for SAP databases such as HANA and ASE but operating systems including SUSE Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Windows Server.
However, the most important drawback of SAP ETD is that it does not support the full suite of cybersecurity capabilities to address cyber risks in SAP solutions. ETD provides coverage for treat detection and patch management. However, it does not provide any support for other important areas such as access control, vulnerability management, custom code security, and compliance monitoring. Coverage for such areas would require the licensing of additional solutions from SAP or integrating capabilities from other platforms such as SAP Solution Manager. Full-suite solutions such as the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP provide integrated capabilities across all cybersecurity scenarios through a single, unified product and license. In addition to comprehensive threat detection and response with anomaly detection, the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP monitors critical access and segregation of duties risks for SAP solutions such as ECC and S/4HANA. It also performs automated vulnerability scans to detect more than 5000 vulnerabilities in SAP applications and infrastructure. Finally, it performs automated audits to detect compliance gaps with more than 15 regulatory and security frameworks and standards, including GDPR, NIST, PCI-DSS and the SAP Security Baseline.
The fallout of the recent worldwide systems outage has far-reaching consequences for cybersecurity. The outage is estimated to impact 8.5 million devices powered by Microsoft Windows operating systems. The cause of the outage is a corrupted update for an agent used for the Falcon security platform from CrowdStrike. Falcon uses a cloud architecture with servers, workstations, containers, virtual machines, and other devices connected directly to CrowdStrike services through an agent installed in each host. The agent operates at the kernel level. The kernel is responsible for managing work processes in operating systems and mediating access to hardware resources.
Operating systems enable applications to run in two modes: user and kernel. Most applications operate in user mode without direct access to the underlying hardware or system resources. Kernel mode is far more privileged and provides applications with unrestricted access to the system including hardware control, memory management, and device drivers. Errors in applications running in user mode are isolated and do not impact the stability of the operating system. However, errors in applications running in kernel mode can crash the operating system. This is exactly what happened with the recent CrowdStrike/ Microsoft outage.
The Falcon agent operates in kernel mode as a device driver. This is most likely because the agent requires privileged access to system data structures to deliver the protection provided by CrowdStrike. Microsoft is well aware of the risk posed by applications running in kernel mode. The Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) program is intended to test and certify third party device drivers to manage the risk. The driver used by the Falcon agent was WHQL tested and certified. However, security products such as Falcon require continuous updates to counter the latest cyber threats. Since it’s not feasible to recertify the driver for each update, updates are applied through dynamic definition files that can include code executed by the driver. This code is not tested and signed as part of the WHQL program. A software bug in unsigned code packaged in a recent update for the Falcon driver running in kernel mode is the root cause of the large-scale system outage.
There are two obvious questions that arise from the events. The first is why was the software bug not discovered and removed before the update was released by CrowdStrike? This points to concerns around development and release management procedures on the part of the software vendor. Understandably, its not feasible to test software updates against for every possible scenario. For example, past CrowdStrike updates have been known to trigger crashes in the Central Management Console and Central Management Server of SAP BusinessObjects. However, given the widespread impact of the current bug, it’s likely that more comprehensive testing would have revealed the error. It also raises questions around inadequate parameter validation by the Falcon agent that may have detected and blocked errors in arguments passed to kernel functions to prevent system crashes. This points to concerns around software design.
The second question is why didn’t organisations analyze the impact of the updates in test machines or perform a staged rollout? Testing would have most likely revealed the issue and a staged rollout of the update would have lessened the impact even if the update wasn’t tested.
The answer to both questions is that both software vendors and customers are responding to a threat landscape that demands rapid response to new and emerging threats. Therefore, organizations are prioritizing speed of response for information security over preserving the availability of their systems. The outage provides a stark reminder of the dangers of this approach.
Systems outages can be especially severe if they impact business-critical SAP solutions. SAP customers should identify third party agents and programs that operate in kernel mode in SAP hosts. The continued use of such software should be reviewed in light of recent events, especially if the software is automatically updated by the vendor without any input from the customer.
The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP protects SAP solutions from advanced persistent threats without the use of kernel-level agents or programs. The solution operates in user mode to monitor and secure the application, database and operating system layers in SAP hosts.
Based on a newly-released paper published by researchers at the University of Illinois, AI agents can combine large language models with automation software to autonomously analyze and exploit security vulnerabilities. During the research, OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model was able to successfully exploit 87 percent of vulnerabilities when provided with a CVE advisory describing the flaws. The dataset included 15 one-day vulnerabilities taken from the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. One-day vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities that have been disclosed but not patched. More than 50 percent of the dataset were critical or high-rated vulnerabilities. Vulnerability exploitation was performed by GPT-4 using the ReAct automation framework.
Large language models are AI programs that use deep learning to recognize and interpret complex data such as human language. GPT-4 failed to exploit just two of the 15 vulnerabilities in the dataset. This included CVE-2023-51653 for Hertzbeat RCE. The cause of the failure to exploit this particular CVE was due to differences between the language available for the detailed description of the vulnerability and the language deployed for the AI agent.
Researchers calculated the cost of successful AI agent attacks at just $8.80 per exploit. The agent consists of only 91 lines of code and has not been publicly released at the request of OpenAI.
The ground-breaking research demonstrates the risk posed by AI to automate the discovery and exploitation of security vulnerabilities. It reduces the complexity and cost of vulnerability exploitation and increases the reach of threat actors.
The details of SAP vulnerabilities are publicly available in sources such as the CVE database and the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). AI agents using large language models can analyze CVEs in the databases including details revealed in links for each CVE. SAP vulnerabilities are also documented and explained in depth in security forums. This often includes disclosure of sample code for vulnerability exploitation.
According to another recent study performed by Flashpoint and Onapsis, ransomware incidents impacting SAP systems increased by 400% over the last three years. Conversations on SAP vulnerabilities and exploits increased by 490% across the open, deep, and dark web between 2021 and 2023.
SAP customers can actively manage the risk of the successful discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities including attacks leveraging artificial intelligence by regularly patching SAP solutions and through on-going vulnerability management. The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP automates the detection of both required SAP security notes and vulnerabilities in SAP solutions and infrastructure. It also detects vulnerabilities in custom SAP applications and programs.
SAP RISE is a cloud-based service offering from SAP that includes the private edition of SAP S/4HANA Cloud at the core. As part of the offering, SAP maintains privately-managed, single-tenanted accounts for each customer with hyperscale providers including AWS, Azure and GCP. The accounts are fully managed by SAP. Therefore, SAP acts as a cloud service provider and the customer is essentially a consumer of an SAP cloud service.
SAP customers are responsible for most aspects of security for on-premise deployments or cloud deployments managed directly with hyperscale providers. However, SAP RISE divides the responsibilities between SAP and customers.
As the cloud service provider, SAP assumes many of the responsibilities for security that would otherwise lay with the customer. This includes security at the hyperscaler and network level, as well as security for databases and servers, including operating systems for SAP servers.
Customers are responsible for the application and data layer. However, the responsibility for these areas can also be shared with SAP through optional Cloud Application Services (CAS) that extend the services delivered through SAP RISE. For example, SAP can assume the responsibility for identifying, analyzing, and implementing required security notes. However, this requires an additional CAS package that is not included in standard RISE services. If the customer does not obtain the package, the responsibility for analyzing and selecting notes for implementation lays with the customer. Once selected, the customer can create a service request for SAP to apply the notes.
The security of custom code is also the responsibility of each customer. Customers are encouraged to analyze custom code and remove obsolete, redundant and duplicate code to comply with SAP’s Clean Core principle. The remaining custom developments can be adapted and migrated to systems maintained by SAP Enterprise Cloud Services. However, customers are responsible for ensuring that the developments are secure and do not contain code-level vulnerabilities. RISE customers can secure custom SAP programs and applications using the SAP-certified Cybersecurity Extension for SAP (CES). CES supports the automated detection of code vulnerabilities in ABAP and UI5 applications. It can be used to support S/4HANA migrations and on-going development and maintenance activities for custom applications.
With the exception of SAP HANA, access control is also the responsibility of customers. This includes managing end user permissions and administrative privileges. Customers can opt-in for optional CAS packages that provide SAP managed services for this area. The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP can be used to monitor access privileges for systems in SAP RISE including segregation of duties violations and access to critical roles, profiles, transactions and authorizations at both the functional and technical level. This includes S/4HANA and supporting systems.
Security hardening is applied by SAP through standard builds used for each ABAP system. The builds include mandatory security settings documented in SAP Note 3250501. This includes areas such as security-relevant profile parameters, securing standard users, deleting unused clients, deactivating vulnerable ICF services, system and client change options, and hardening for the RFC gateway and message server. The settings can be overridden by customers. Therefore, it is important to automate monitoring for compliance with the hardening requirements. This can be performed using the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP. Compliance Reporting in CES will automatically identify compliance gaps for SAP systems against the requirements of SAP Enterprise Cloud Services (ECS) in Note 3250501.
The final area that customers are responsible for is logging and monitoring. SAP provides customers with access to application logs. Customers can request access to OS, DB and network logs. This is provisioned using a premium offering called LogServe. The application and infrastructure logs can be integrated with SIEM solutions to automate threat detection and response. Alternatively, customers can pay for SAP Enterprise Threat Detection (ETD), cloud edition, or opt for a 24/7 or 8/5 managed service from SAP based on ETD. Neither option is included in standard RISE services.
The cloud edition of ETD includes less than 50 patterns for detecting Indicators of Compromise (IOC) in SAP solutions. The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP provides more than 900 patterns to detects IOCs in SAP systems, including patterns for databases, operating systems, and standalone components such as the SAProuter and Web Dispatcher.
Overall, SAP RISE does not delegate the responsibility for security patching, secure development, access control, hardening, and logging and monitoring from customers to SAP. This is possible for some areas but only through the addition of optional packages that are not included in standard RISE services. Customer and SAP responsibilities are detailed in a comprehensive matrix provided by SAP ECS for more than 1000 tasks. The matrix is a reference for standard, optional, and additional services, excluded tasks, and services available through available CAS packages that are subject to additional service fees. Note that the matrix is subject to change by SAP.
According to a recent report from SAPinsider, almost two-thirds of organizations are placing cybersecurity projects on hold or scaling back planned investments in cybersecurity due to the current economic climate. 18 percent of organizations are reducing the size of cybersecurity teams. The latter can have a drastic effect on collaboration and morale. The impact is also long-lasting and difficult to reverse. According to the Ponemon Institute, it takes an average of 7.3 months to recruit and train security analysts. The training required by new analysts also draws time from experienced analysts, reducing the overall effectiveness of cybersecurity teams.
Organizations are experiencing budgetary and resource constraints against a background of rising cyber attacks. The SAPinsider report quotes JP Perez-Etchegoyen, CTO of Onapsis, “threat actors aren’t going to slow down because of a recession. The risk is real, and the impact is huge. We see threat actors targeting organizations even more now than before.”
This article discusses several ways organizations can manage cyber threats without increasing cybersecurity budgets or resources. In fact, many of the recommendations will lead directly to cost savings and the more efficient use of resources in cybersecurity teams.
1. Eliminate Duplicate Security Solutions
Based on research performed by IBM Security and the Ponemon Institute, organizations deploy an average of 45 security solutions. The quantity of tools used by organizations does not lead directly to improved cybersecurity. Organizations using 50 or more tools were ranked as less able to detect and respond to attacks than those using fewer tools. Increasing the number of security solutions creates complexity, requires more employee training, and creates integration issues. Since security solutions can also suffer from software vulnerabilities and widen the attack surface, too many solutions can increase both workloads for regular patching and aggregate risk.
SAP Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platforms such as SAP Solution Manager, SAP Focused Run, and SAP Cloud ALM are widely-used for monitoring and diagnostics scenarios in SAP landscapes. With the exception of SAP Focused Run, usage rights for the platforms are included in SAP support agreements. The platforms include direct connectivity to SAP systems and applications to extract and analyze configuration, software and user-related data in SAP applications, databases and hosts. The platforms also include security tools to support vulnerability management and patch management.
Organizations can leverage these ALM platforms to perform many of the same functions of costly third-party alternatives. This will avoid unnecessary license fees and installing and maintaining hosts, connections, agents and users required by third party tools.
Organizations can extend the capabilities of ALM platforms using addons such as the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP from Layer Seven Security for areas such as threat detection and custom code security. This is less costly and involves less maintenance than third party solutions that require separate servers, infrastructure and connections, including external connections to other networks using Internet protocols.
2. Minimize Manual Steps in SAP Security Patching
Regularly patching SAP systems is the single most important action you can take to secure business-critical SAP applications from cyber threats. Despite the concern surrounding zero-day vulnerabilities, every known SAP exploit targets existing vulnerabilities patched by SAP through security notes. In other words, there is no evidence of the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities for SAP applications. However, there is a wealth of evidence for the exploitation of known vulnerabilities that have been fully patched by SAP. This includes well-known SAP vulnerabilities such as ICMAD, RECON and 10KBLAZE.
Organizations take an average of three months to implement hot news notes for critical SAP vulnerabilities. Yet threat actors can weaponize SAP vulnerabilities within 72 hours of a patch release. Therefore, it is important to minimize the window of opportunity for attackers by rapidly discovering, analyzing and implementing SAP security notes.
System Recommendations (SysRec) in SAP Solution Manager should be used to automate the discovery and full lifecycle management of SAP security notes. SysRec is a standard application, recommended by SAP for patch management. It is automatically enabled during the installation and setup of Solution Manager. However, many of the security notes reported by SysRec are false positives. SAP administrators spend a great deal of time manually validating the results of SysRec every month to remove false positives. The workload is especially high in large SAP landscapes with large volumes of systems. The Cybersecurity for SAP automatically identifies and removes false positives in System Recommendations. This improves the quality and reliability of security notes calculated by SysRec and removes the need to manually validate notes before applying corrections.
3. Automate SAP Compliance Audits
SAP solutions often support business-critical processes such as financial reporting, customer relationship management, and human capital management and therefore need to comply with strict standards for information security. This includes requirements for secure configuration, system changes, and administrative access. SAP solutions are subject to regular audits by internal and external auditors and other groups to confirm compliance with such requirements. The audits can place a significant burden on SAP teams. Automating audits can lead to significant improvements in the quality and timeliness of compliance monitoring and lower the manual effort involved in gathering evidence, analyzing results and reporting findings.
Compliance Reporting in the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP automates compliance gap assessments for SAP solutions. This includes regulatory frameworks such as SOX, GDPR and PCI DSS, industry standards such as HIPAA HITRUST and CIP, and security standards such as CIS, NIST and ISO. It also supports SAP frameworks such as the SAP Security Baseline and the S/4HANA Security Guide. Customers can also create and publish custom frameworks for monitoring compliance against company-specific policies and standards. Reports can be scheduled and automatically sent to stakeholders including compliance and audit teams on a regular interval.
4. Tune Security Alerts
Security solutions can trigger alerts and notifications for suspected security incidents that upon further investigation are false positives. Solutions can also overwhelm users with a large volume of alerts that cannot be realistically investigated with available resources. The latter scenario is known is alert flooding. This leads to wasted effort and reduces the confidence level of end users in the underlying solutions. It can also increase infrastructure costs through higher data volumes and events per second.
False positives and alert flooding can be minimized by tuning alerts for specific systems and landscapes. This enables security solutions to learn the unique event and user patterns for each system and exclude the patterns from alerting. The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP supports advanced tuning for event collection and alerting. Users can maintain exclusions for alerts based on user, client, event ID, transaction, source/ destination IP or terminal, and other variables to prevent false positives and alert flooding. Users can also select enable/ disable specific alerts to customize monitoring and focus, for example, on critical or high priority incidents only.
5. Automate Incident Response
Automating incident response for security alerts can improve the efficiency of security operations and response times. It also supports compliance with standard operating procedures for incident management since there is less risk of human error. The guided procedure framework in SAP Solution Manager and SAP Focused Run includes a library of automated alert reaction procedures. SAP users can also use the framework to author their own procedures as custom guided procedures. The procedures can automate routine tasks such as transaction, program or report execution, as well as more complex tasks such as locking/ unlocking users or restarting systems that may have been disrupted by a denial of service attack.
The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP also includes incident response procedures that users can execute to investigate security alerts. The procedures provide best practices and playbooks for responding to alerts and enable users to document findings, attach evidence, generate reports, and manage the status of alerts. It also provides a complete audit trail for each investigation performed by analysts.
6. Integrate SAP Logs with SIEM Solutions
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions enable Security Operations Centers (SOC) to ingest and monitor logs from various endpoints in networks. They provide a centralized platform for monitoring multiple assets within an enterprise. Centralized monitoring through a single or multiple SOCs can improve efficiency and lower costs, as well as improve visibility and capability to respond to threats across different assets.
There are inherent challenges with integrating SAP logs with SIEM solutions. The challenges are discussed in detail in the whitepaper SIEM Integration for SAP from Layer Seven Security. The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP supports seamless integration with SIEM solutions. It removes the effort and complexity for successfully ingesting SAP logs. This is achieved through filtering, normalizing and enriching of SAP logs and through the creation of a single point of integration between SIEM solutions and a data source containing event logs from all target SAP systems.
Earlier this month, MGM Resorts reported a major cyber attack that severely disrupted its operations including online and payment processing systems. Threat actors are reported to have breached MGM’s network and systems and exfiltrated several terabytes of sensitive data. The company was forced to shut down several key systems as it worked with law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity companies to investigate and contain the breach.
MGM reported the incident in form 8-K filings required by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). New SEC rules effective from September 5 require publicly listed organizations in the U.S to disclose material cybersecurity incidents within four business days.
The hacking group Scattered Spider, part of the ALPHV cyber criminal organization, has claimed responsibility for the breach. Scattered Spider is believed to have breached around 100 organizations within the last two years, mostly in the U.S and Canada. According to statements released by ALPHV, also known as BlackCat, the group was able to breach MGM by exploiting vulnerabilities in an access and identity management provider and cloud tenant. Once they gained administrative access to more than 100 ESXi hypervisors at MGM, ALPHV began deploying ransomware in the compromised systems. Ransomware is a form of malware that encrypts the file system to lock targets until a ransom is paid by the victim.
Caesars Entertainment also reported in September that it had been the victim of a successful ransomware attack that breached personally-identifiable information in it’s loyalty program database including drivers license and social security numbers. Caesars disclosed in it’s 8-K filing with the SEC that the organization paid a $15 million ransom to prevent the disclosure of the stolen data and restore access to its compromised systems.
The business impact of ransomware can be significant in terms of both direct and indirect costs and reputational harm. For example, according to the credit rating agency Moody’s, the cyberattack at MGM could negatively impact the credit rating of the company.
SAP systems are not immune to ransomware. They can be compromised through vulnerable operating systems supporting SAP solutions, insecure protocols, interfaces and cross-system interfaces, and OS commands performed through the application layer that exploit trust relationships between SAP applications and hosts. In response to the recent breaches at Caesars and MGM, Layer Seven Security has released an updated guide for securing SAP solutions from ransomware. Layer Seven Security is an industry-leader in cybersecurity services and solutions for SAP. The guide provides clear and succinct recommendations to prevent and detect ransomware attacks in SAP systems, as well as restore systems during the recovery phase. You can download the guide directly from SAPinsider by following this link.
SAP systems have a wide attack surface. Threat actors can enumerate and exploit multiple known vulnerabilities in SAP components and programs to compromise SAP solutions. Automated vulnerability scans often reveal hundreds of weaknesses in SAP systems. Remediating each vulnerability requires extensive planning and testing for each impacted system. Most organizations do not have the resources to remediate every vulnerability to close all possible attack vectors in their SAP solutions. A prioritized approach focused on remediating high-risk vulnerabilities can be used to concentrate efforts. Organizations can also focus on vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited in their SAP systems. This involves correlating user and system activity captured in SAP logs with vulnerabilities that have been identified in systems.
This correlation is performed automatically by the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP (CES). CES is an addon for SAP Solution Manager and SAP Focused Run. CES will also be available as an extension for SAP Cloud ALM in 2024.
CES performs daily automated scans to detect over 4000 vulnerabilities in SAP applications and supporting databases and operating systems. The vulnerabilities are analyzed and managed using the Vulnerability Management application in CES. The application displays a summary of vulnerability scan results when accessed. Users can switch between the system card view and the dashboard view in the summary.
System Card View:
Dashboard View:
Users can select one or more system from the Summary to drilldown to the findings.
The Overview section displays the open vulnerabilities for the selected systems. Results can be filtered and sorted by area, environment, rating and other variables.
Responsibility for remediating vulnerabilities can be assigned to specific owners and assignees directly in the Overview. Target dates can also be maintained for the removal of the root causes of issues. Remediation plans can be maintained in the Action Plan tab in the detailed display for each vulnerability.
Actively exploited vulnerabilities are identified and flagged based on automated and continuous correlation with event logs and alerts in CES. Results can be filtered to focus on vulnerabilities that have active alerts. Users can also create and publish alarms to their Launchpads for actively exploited vulnerabilities using the Save as Tile option.
In the example below, there is an open alert for the successful call of a vulnerable ICF service in a system. Although the vulnerability is rated as medium-risk, the active exploitation of the vulnerability in the system indicates that the finding should be prioritized for remediation.
The alert for the vulnerability can be analyzed by clicking on the alert icon for the vulnerability. This directs to the details of the alert in the Security Alerts application in CES.
The automated discovery and reporting of actively exploited vulnerabilities is supported in version 5.0 and higher of the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP.
Earlier this month, SAPinsider released the 2023 Cybersecurity Threats to SAP Systems Report. Co-sponsored by Layer Seven Security, the report is based on the findings of a survey of more than 205 security professionals in North America, EMEA, APJ, and LATAM, representing SAP customers across nine industries.
The report revealed several trends in 2023 compared to reports for earlier years. Similar to 2022, respondents ranked unpatched systems, ransomware attacks, and credentials compromise as the most significant threats to SAP systems. The exploitation of system interfaces and weak access controls were also identified as important but less significant threats.
Patching and updating SAP systems and enforcing secure password policies were reported as the most important requirements for SAP cybersecurity. Protecting SAP systems from zero-days threats was also identified as an important requirement, even though there is no evidence of the successful exploitation of any zero-day vulnerability for SAP solutions.
This article provides practical recommendations for managing the top five threats to SAP systems presented in the report. The recommendations can be implemented using a combination of the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP and SAP ALM platforms such as Solution Manager, Focused Run, and Cloud ALM. According to the report, 81% of customers are using one or more of these platforms. However, less than half of SAP customers are fully leveraging the capabilities of their ALM investments.
Security Patching
Keeping up with patches is the most significant cybersecurity challenge reported by SAP customers. This is due to reasons such as the volume of patches, difficulties with prioritizing notes and scheduling system downtimes, the reluctance to apply notes that could impact system availability, and issues validating whether patches are correctly implemented. The last is especially challenging for notes with manual corrections.
System Recommendations (SysRec) in SAP Solution Manager automates the discovery and implementation of security notes for SAP solutions. It calculates relevant notes based on the installed software components and versions in systems. Notes can be filtered by priority to focus on hot news and high priority patches. SysRec also identifies objects impacted by security notes and provides usage counts for the objects. This can be used to develop targeted test plans based on the known impact of security notes. Notes impacting unused objects can be implemented with minimal testing.
Automated corrections can be downloaded through SysRec and staged in systems for implementation. Once implemented successfully, the relevant notes are automatically removed from the SysRec results. The implementation status of notes with manual corrections can be maintained using the Status option. False positives in SysRec can occur if notes are released by SAP without software component information. The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP (CES) automatically discovers and removes the false positives to improve the quality and reliability of notes reported by SysRec.
Ransomware
Ransomware can target SAP applications through multiple attack vectors. Unauthorized external program starts through the gateway server should be restricted using the secinfo access control list. Authorizations for OS commands should be restricted. This includes authorizations for RSBDCOS0, SM49 and CG3Z which can be used to download, install and run ransomware tools. Custom ABAP, UI5, Java and SQLScript programs may be exploited to perform arbitrary OS commands. Vulnerable programs can be discovered using code vulnerability scanning solutions. Vulnerable ICF services such as SOAP RFC and WEB RFC should be disabled. The SAP Virus Scan Interface should be enabled to support the detection of malware in file uploads and the propagation of ransomware through file downloads.
Ransomware can also target hosts supporting SAP applications. Therefore, it is important to secure and monitor the operating system layer in SAP systems. Unnecessary ports and services should be closed. Root commands and sudo actions should be closely monitored, particularly wget and bash commands, and the creation and execution of OS files. The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP is the only security solution that protects and detects against ransomware across application, database and OS layers in SAP systems.
Credentials Compromise
Transport layer security using SNC and SSL for SAP protocols will protect encoded SAP passwords in client-server and server-server communications. Access to password hashes in SAP tables should be restricted and monitored. Downwards-compatible passwords should be disabled since this will prevent the storage of password hashes that use vulnerable algorithms. Strong password policies should be enforced using the relevant settings in systems including login parameters in ABAP systems. Session management should be enabled and logon tickets and cookies should be secured against misuse. Detection and alerting for SAP accounts that may have been compromised can be activated using Anomaly Detection in the Cybersecurity Extension for SAP. Anomaly Detection will detect for unusual user actions such logins from new terminals or IP addresses for each user and the execution of transactions and reports that are not typically accessed by users.
System Interfaces
Program starts, server registrations, and monitor commands should be restricted for the gateway server. The use of RFC destinations with stored credentials should be restricted. The authorizations for RFC users should be provisioned based on the principle of least privilege to minimize the impact if RFC accounts are compromised. RFC user accounts should be system or communication user types, not dialog or reference. Positive whitelists are recommended to prevent the misuse of RFC callbacks. Trusted RFC connections should be used only in the required scenarios and trust relationships should not be configured from lower to higher order environments.
Unified Connectivity (UCON) should be enabled and configured to protect external calls to sensitive remote-enabled function modules (RFMs). Requests blocked by UCON are logged in the Security Audit Log.
Interface and Connection Monitoring (ICMon) in SAP Solution Manager and Integration and Exception Monitoring in SAP Focused Run can be deployed to identify critical internal and external system interfaces. This includes RFC, HTTP, Cloud, IDoc, and Web Service connections. Alerts can be configured for the usage of system interfaces outside of normal scenarios. For example, customers can enable alerting for an RFC destination if it used by a user not included in a permitted whitelist or if the destination is used to call RFMs that are not typically called by the destination. Similar alerting can be enabled for calls to applications, IDocs, cloud services and web services accessed using non-RFC protocols.
Access Controls
Access to administrative profiles, roles, authorizations and transactions should be restricted. This includes roles and permissions in SAP databases and hosts. The SAP_ALL profile should not be used in productive systems. Standard users should be locked and default passwords should be changed. Authorization checks should be enforced for all RFMs and system operations. Switchable authorization checks should be enabled wherever applicable to secure access to sensitive function modules. Conflicting functions should be assigned to separate users to enforce the segregation of duties. This includes user creation/ role maintenance, role maintenance/ role assignment, and transport creation/ transport release.
The Cybersecurity Extension for SAP can be used to discover users with administrative permissions or access to conflicting functions. It can also alert for the execution of sensitive programs, reports and transactions. Exclusions can be maintained for specific users or based on factors such as user group to support whitelisting and prevent false positives or alert flooding.
