A Guide to Rootkits and Trojans in ABAP Programs

If you missed Ertunga Arsal’s presentation on SAP Rootkits and Trojans at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, you can now watch the entire hour-long session below. Ertunga is an accomplished SAP security expert and an entertaining speaker if you appreciate dry, German humour. In this video, Ertunga demonstrates how attackers can use several paths to compromise weak SAP systems (usually development or test environments), infect clients that connect to the compromised systems and then eventually work their way up to production and even partner systems. These so-called˜Triple Penetration’ attacks can compromise entire SAP landscapes.

Ertunga also demonstrates how attackers can crack hashed SAP passwords and discusses problems with SSO. He makes a great comment about how SSO is really a convenience feature and does nothing to improve security and shows how attackers can create their own SSO certificates to logon to SAP using the IDs of users in the target system.

However, the highlight of the session is the discussion around SAP Rootkits and Trojans. Ertunga walks through several injection attacks that can be used to infect ABAP programs. Rootkits can be used to execute commands that, for example, automatically donate part of a company’s profit to charity (the so-called ‘Robin Hood’ worm) or publish salary information online. He points out that development activities should be tightly controlled and monitored, especially if you’re using third party developers with SAP_ALL rights. If your developers are internal, Ertunga warns against hiring developers from competitors since this can open the door to commercial espionage and sabotage.

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