Assessing Your SAP Implementation: Tips from Onapsis Research Labs
SAP systems are the backbone of many organizations, especially for most of the largest enterprises, housing critical business data and processes. However, a poorly secured SAP environment can leave your organization vulnerable to data breaches, financial losses, reputational damage and significant compliance or regulatory implications. This article explores the different approaches to assessing the security posture of your SAP implementation, ensuring its robustness against potential security threats and attacks.
Understanding the Threat Landscape
Before diving into assessment methods, let’s acknowledge the diverse threats that affect SAP Applications:
- Software Vulnerabilities in SAP Applications: Like any software, SAP is susceptible to vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. These vulnerabilities can exist in core modules, add-ons, or custom code.
- Misconfigured security settings: Improperly configured settings and security parameters can create gaps for unauthorized access.
- Authentication and password management: Insufficient password policies, lack of authentications, password reuse, default passwords and similar issues can make it easier for attackers to gain access.
- Insider threats: SAP Applications are typically used by thousands of different users concurrently. One disgruntled employee or one with excessive privileges can pose a significant risk to the organization.
Approaches to Assess SAP Security
Assessing the security of SAP Applications involves the utilization of various tools and techniques to identify and address security gaps. There are many methodologies that can be used to assess these applications. Regardless of the methodology, all of these will produce as part of the output a list of security weaknesses/vulnerabilities, prioritized by severity and that will include the mitigation steps or solution. As for the methodology, these are some of the most common options organizations can leverage:
- SAP Vulnerability Assessment (VA): This assessment is mostly automated, leveraging technology to scan your SAP system for known vulnerabilities in different areas of the application (software patches, configurations, user access or custom code to name a few).
- SAP Penetration Testing (Pen Test): This type of assessment implies a simulated attack on your SAP system, mimicking real-world attacker tactics. Pen testers employ a combination of automated tools and manual techniques to identify vulnerabilities, exploit them to gain unauthorized access, and assess the potential impact. The Pentest project will typically provide a list of attack vectors or attack scenarios that were used by the pentesters or that could have been used based on the vulnerabilities detected on the system. Additionally, Pen tests are categorized into:
- Black-box testing: Simulates an external attacker with no prior knowledge of the system. This approach uncovers vulnerabilities that could be exploited by anyone without the need of a username/password.
- White-box testing: Involves testers with additional knowledge of the system such as configurations / internal documentation or even access credentials. This approach reveals weaknesses that could be exploited by insiders or attackers with some level of access.
- SAP Custom Code Assessment: Custom code developed within SAP can introduce vulnerabilities if not rigorously reviewed. This assessment focuses on identifying security flaws within the custom code, ensuring it adheres to best practices and doesn’t introduce security vulnerabilities.
- SAP Security Audit: A comprehensive review of your SAP security posture, encompassing user access controls, authorization management, security policies, and procedures. It assesses compliance with industry regulations and best practices, identifying areas for improvement. This type of assessment requires a higher investment of time and resources, as it covers more areas and in more depth than other types of assessments.
Choosing the Right Approach:
The choice of assessment methods depends on your specific needs and risk profile. Here’s a breakdown to help you decide:
- For a comprehensive understanding of vulnerabilities: Perform an SAP vulnerability assessment.
- To simulate real-world attacks: Perform an SAP penetration test, either black-box or white-box depending on your threat model.
- To ensure the security of custom code: Include a custom code assessment.
- For a comprehensive view of security posture: Conduct an SAP security audit.
Beyond Assessments: Building a Secure SAP Environment
Security assessments are valuable tools, but they are just one piece of the puzzle, providing visibility into areas of security that organizations can improve. Here are additional steps to build a robust SAP security posture:
- Implement strong access controls: Enforce the principle of least privilege, granting users only the access they need to perform their jobs. This has been historically a strong area of focus for organizations securing their SAP Applications.
- Regularly update SAP software: Stay up-to-date with the latest security patches to address newly discovered vulnerabilities in SAP Software.
- Monitor user activity: Implement security monitoring to assess user behavior, detect suspicious activity as well as potential exploitation of vulnerabilities and weaknesses.
- Secure your development pipelines: Integrate vulnerability scanning into your pipelines of custom code development to prevent the introduction of new vulnerabilities.
- Implement Threat Intelligence Analysis: Ensure you have access to a timely vetted and quality source of threat intelligence implemented into your overall monitoring and alerting of activities.
Different types of assessments will give you different perspectives into potential security risks but remember that security is an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Regularly assess your SAP environment, stay vigilant, and adapt your security posture to address the ever-changing threat landscape.