Proactive leaders who don’t wait for cyber threats to strike know that staying ahead is a necessity, not an option. With every new development in cybercrime, it’s vital to anticipate and counter potential attacks before they reach your system.
Protecting SAP systems demands a vigilant, forward-thinking approach. Sophisticated threats don’t just target vulnerabilities—they aim for the heart of your operations and critical data. That’s why proactive defenses, like best practices and countermeasures, are essential to slowing down attackers before they can breach your defenses.
Proactive Countermeasures You Should Be Taking
Here are some simple tactics you should be using to protecting your SAP environment.
Honeyports
Wouldn’t it be useful if you could essentially ban a user that performs an illicit action in your SAP system? Through this technique, you can.
Honeyports watch for external connections that perform a specific pre-defined action within your SAP environment. Once that action is observed, the honeyport can be enlisted to block that user, effectively preventing any fraudulent activity.
Honeyusers
Honeyusers are decoys used to bait fraudsters. A honeyuser looks legitimate, but it tricks those with ill intent, ideally leading them to revealing their illicit motives.
Since honeyusers don’t serve any real SAP purpose, interactions with them are telling. This is how you can identify attackers before they do any damage. Honeyusers are especially helpful in preventing attacks that rely on compromised usernames and passwords.
Honeypots
A honeypot is a safe setup—essentially a dummy environment—that shows how fraudsters operate while also analyzing threats. Unlike many other proactive cybersecurity measures, honeypots are especially useful in identifying internal threats. For example, honeypots can help you identify weaknesses in your organization’s permissions that could be exploited.
Honeypots also serve as a great distraction. The more time cyber attackers spend in a honeypot, the longer they’re not doing damage to actually sensitive environments.
Honeytables
Honeytables are full of completely manufactured data. It can appear as a document within your SAP environment or as a database. Either way, because the information isn’t real, any interaction with it is inherently suspicious. It’s another form of bait that lures fraudsters into exposing themselves.
The 3 Rules of Identification and Classification
When it comes to recognizing and categorizing threats to your SAP environment, we recommend following the three principles outlined in a recent NOMONKEY web event with partner, SecurityBridge, entitled, “Tackling SAP Security Together: Slowing Down Attackers.”
Identifying Techniques Must Be Accurate
You have to be sure that what you believe you’ve observed is what you actually observed.
“Utilizing hunting activities is an important component of detecting anomalous activity,” said Waseem Ajrab, Head of Security Advisory at NO MONKEY. “It’s an important part of how you then feed your detection capabilities.
“It’s not just about IOCs, it’s not just about scanning IP addresses. It’s more about identifying anomalous activity than determining whether it’s actually malicious in nature.”
Practices for Identification and Classification Must Go Hand-in-Hand
Consistency is key when it comes to cybersecurity. Ajrab pointed out that organizations must develop standards and practices that are universally applied. One of the best ways to do that is through automation.
“You want to make sure every time an event is triggered that you’re able to identify that,” he said. “Automating those processes will help you look into other things, as well as with classification, which is instrumental in determining whether an event is truly suspicious.”
Events Must Be Classified as Either Malicious or Benign
When it comes right down to it, cybersecurity events are dichotomous. They’re either harmful or harmless, Ajrab highlighted.
“The point of threat hunting should be to determine whether anomalous activity is actually happening or not. Is it malicious by nature or not?”
How to Respond and Recover Quickly
In the event of a detected cybersecurity issue, time is of the essence. In fact, time is money. The more the episode prolongs, the more costly it is to the organization.
That means that your readiness is of the utmost importance.
“You must prepare as you would with a fire drill,” said Joris van de Vis, Director of Security Research at SecurityBridge. “Preparedness will definitely save you a lot of time and a lot of money.”
How do you do that? Van de Vis outlined three distinct steps necessary for preparing for a cybersecurity event:
- Crystal-clear roles and responsibilities
- A consistent, rigorous testing schedule
- Proactive strategies that define numerous threat scenarios
“Come up with a well-defined plan,” van de Vis said, “then make sure you do everything you possibly can to ensure you don’t ever need to execute that plan.”
“You must prepare, as you would with a fire drill. It will definitely save you a lot of time and a lot of money. Come up with a well-defined plan and make sure that you test that plan regularly. You have to do everything you can to make sure you don’t need to execute that plan.”
Your Roadmap to SAP Security Success
There’s certainly always a lot to consider when it comes to safeguarding your organization’s SAP environment. If you’re looking for a condensed, simplified regimen to get started, NO MONKEY has you covered.
Here are the four key steps we recommend to developing your own path toward SAP security.
- Define clear objectives and requirements with stakeholders. Knowing who’s responsible for what goes a long way in planning for and ultimately defending against cyber attacks. Solidify these roles and tasks within your organization, and it will mature the security posture of your SAP environment.
- Hold a scoping workshop to establish your organization’s specific requirements and objectives for an SAP security roadmap. The old adage goes, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Start there; find out where your SAP environment is lacking. After all, it’s hard to know how to get to where you want to go when you don’t even know where you’re starting.
- Develop an SAP security training roadmap. Once you’ve learned what you need from Step 2, you’ll know your organization’s security streams. That will better inform you of where you need to go, and how to get there.
- Distribute continuous expert support. Education is an ongoing process. It’s no different in the SAP world. In order to be truly prepared, your organization needs to continue coaching all relevant parties. Develop support systems that act as learning resources for all stakeholders.
SAP security is an ever-shifting landscape. Threats are continuously advancing as fraudsters cultivate innovative and creative ways to compromise data. This means your organization can’t stand still and must be forward-thinking in order to stay in front of threats.
Protecting your SAP systems can be overwhelming with all of the actions your team can take. To help organizations fully understand what is needed and to ensure your team is as prepared as possible, NO MONKEY offers SAP Security Academy and Advisory services.
NO MONKEY Advisory equips you with the knowledge you need to make well-informed, risk-based decisions to protect business-critical SAP systems, applications, and digital assets. If you’re even the least bit unsure as to whether your organization can do that on its own, contact NO MONKEY today.
