2019 was the year of data breaches, security invasions, and cyber-attacks. The healthcare industry saw the worst cyber-attacks and most of them related to identity theft. Information such as date of birth, social security number, and name allows hackers to invade your personal space, which leads to phishing attempts – in the most sophisticated manner.
Check this website to know more about the top data breaches of 2019.
Why You Should Care?
A lot of enterprises feel safe in their well-defined IT infrastructure, safety architecture, and policy framework. Do you think you are safe with these? If you think so, read through. Cyber-threats need not be always from the outside world who are trying to invade your space or enter your office system. It is highly likely for the internal stakeholders to open doors to outsiders.
With that being said, the above statement only means that it is possible for your employees to unknowingly initiate a data theft.
How it is possible?
Most of the time, it is beyond the knowledge of the employee that he or she has initiated a cyber-attack. For instance, leaving the office door open to unknown professionals or sharing security-enabled data or passwords with unauthorized professionals might initiate an attack.
Remember that attackers are willing to get into your ERP system like SAP by exploiting vulnerable entries in technical, infrastructure, and security layers. Your workforce is the easiest entry point. When the stakeholders of your business are not properly trained, it likely for them to turn the security structure upside down without intentional urge to do so.
Hence, if you own SAP system as your ERP, it is time you stop thinking of the security architecture you have in place and start thinking of how to consistently monitor SAP’s cyber-security from every direction. It is necessary to develop a custom security and governance strategy to mitigate and address looming system risks.
Check out this interesting article shared by Reuters on how hackers invade our ERP systems like Oracle and SAP.
What are the recent cyber-attacks happened in SAP space?
In 2012, we saw the first SAP system attack. Till then, of course, everyone was oblivious of the situation and didn’t think that it is even possible to break into the SAP system. But, it happened then and it can happen now.
An anonymous group invaded Greece’s Ministry of Finance’s SAP system. The result, the theft involved the credentials of several ministry employees, identity theft, and major damage to the reputation.
Since then, the SAP attacks never ceased. There were attacks where banking information was pulled from the system and key logging was utilized to extract data related to passwords.
In 2014, a GPU-maker NVidia experienced an attack on its old SAP NetWeaver. They failed to implement an SAP-approved patch, which caused them a lot. The customer service data breach was undeniably destructive for the organization in every sense.
In 2018, the US National Cyber-security and Communications Integration Center released a report indicating “A rapidly rising interest by hacker activists, cyber-criminals and government spy agencies in raiding vulnerable ERPs.” According to the report, at least 10,000 organizations are using vulnerable SAP implementations and there are more than 4,000 separate bugs in SAP packages that hackers can use as an entry point.
All of these incidents caused huge damage. Till the time, the attack was detected, thousands of dollars worth of damage was already caused.
Why SAP Clients Are at Risk?
As mentioned, you might have a strong security strategy, Virtual private networks, Anti Virus and Anti threat detection software, and so on. Having such highly sophisticated hardware/software doesn’t save you from these threats.
Here are few reasons on why your SAP system might be at risk:
How to Minimize the Risk?
Following are few of the suggestions to minimize the risk.
- Consistent updating of patches.
- Regular SAP audits.
- Regular proactive security measures.
- Ensuring employee security training.
UserSentry for SAP System Security
UserSentry is a solution by ToggleNow which adds a layer of security above your SAP system. The package has powerful, proactive capabilities that converts your access activities to identity-driven processes. Using UserSentry, you can secure your network from sophisticated, hard-to-detect cyber-attacks, which can compromise your critical business data and applications.
- Multi-factor authentication for SAP, which mandates users to identify themselves at multiple levels of login to ensure high-level access security.
- Dormant ID and role review, which allows you to define the rule for a dormant account. Using this, it is possible to automate the locking and tracking of dormant accounts. Further, the solution offers a chance to define user roles and define parameters that will lead to the expiry of roles.
- Device-specific lockout, which means you can lockout a set of users from certain devices with the help of UserSentry.
- Critical download monitoring, which indicates that UserSentry helps you with end-to-end monitoring of user download activity.
