SAP Security Monitoring and Why Is It Important
Security is a key element required by any enterprise technology for ensuring business success and growth as well as trust in their buyers. But where to start in setting up a security posture in your SAP environment?
As a security specialist, you know your customers are usually only a click away from your services and products. Your clients might only notice technical deficiencies and will not get into detail about the security aspects of all the systems you use. In case of a data breach, however, this would be the first thing the Regulators would ask about.
In such a situation, to increase your level of security, you should look into the system security monitoring features of the third-party software your organization uses for handling customer data – for example, SAP.
An SAP-oriented cybersecurity solution should find a way to integrate additional security layers into the SAP infrastructure and ensure that SAP logs are protected from data tamerting.
The purpose of this article is to help you and your organization to evaluate whether it is worth increasing the security level of your SAP environment, in order to avoid the risks that come along with it.
SAP Interface Security Monitoring
When you use SAP for the first time, and your first run into its interface security monitoring function, you can be a little frustrated. You find yourself asking where is the interface security monitoring and where is the logging of every security-related operation which took place in SAP.
The interface security monitoring is a very sophisticated monitoring and a very sophisticated logging feature, that gives you a deep insight into the security activity taking place in your SAP environment. SAP security monitoring encompasses the practice of actively analyzing all movements (both vertical and lateral) within your production and non-production systems in efforts of identifying both external and internal threats.
In this article, we will review the purpose and the objectives of SAP security monitoring, what is the role of this functionality, and what are the use cases for upgrading an SAP interface security monitoring with a budget SIEM tool for achieving full visibility and log integrity across all other systems your organization might use.
What is SAP Enterprise Threat Detection?
The security landscape has changed, and now more than ever it’s critical to protect sensitive information in data centers. With an increased focus on protecting network systems, you need the right tools, platforms, and systems to protect sensitive information. But how do you actually go about implementing those tools, platforms, or system solutions? The answer lies with an SAP interface security monitor and an easy-to-integrate SIEM system.
SAP has a built-in SIEM monitoring module that allows you to monitor various aspects of your SAP software. There are several interfaces between SAP and the SIS-M system (security information and event management solutions for SAP); therefore, it is essential that in order to monitor interfaces that are used by SAP, you must first have a basic understanding of the system (if you have not already done so).
The built-in SIEM feature that SAP has helps IT teams to detect threats in real-time. This, however, is often not enough, because it does not easily integrate with the rest of the systems that an organization has. It can be a good addition, if the SIEM system you’re currently using, allows easy integration with the rest of the systems you use, to get a complete overview.
When it comes to securing SAP software, you must start by implementing a SIEM solution. Having the SAP interface security monitor and SIEM system in place will allow you to monitor all the important links in any interfaces between SAP and other applications. It will ensure that the SAP software is not exposed to any threats and is highly secure.
What Is the Objective of Securing Your SAP?
The objective in securing SAP using a SIEM system is to monitor all the interfaces and use all security techniques and methods in order to defend against potential attacks. There are several other benefits of using SIEM for SAP security:
• It is a central place to gather details on any threats that may target your SAP software:
• In fact, it will show the complete flow of all information in real-time to the user. The more detailed information you gather, the better prepared you can make in terms of defenses and solutions to ensure maximum protection.
• It brings complete details that allow you to analyze and identify threats before the threat reaches your SAP data and systems.
SAP Security Monitoring Use Cases
Unauthorized Access
By using SIEM software, you will be able to monitor authentication activities and get alerted for anomalies in real-time.
LogSentinel SIEM’s AI and machine learning capabilities unlock a smart way of learning and reacting to potential security breaches. Real-time updates will let you know when there are anomalies in your authentication activities such as new accounts, new IPs, devices, proxies, capturing different authentication mechanisms among other things. All these usual irregularities will be captured and alerts such as phishing emails, brute-force, or new login warnings will pop up. The solution is a great addition to any business that transmits sensitive data and has sensitive records stored on SAP.
Sensitive Operations
SIEM software, when used for sensitive operations, monitors for T-codes under fraudulent or inappropriate use. It is an effective system because all T-codes can be solely monitored. Without the use of SIEM software such as LogSentinel, these codes could not be caught regularly.
Privilege Abuse
Many organizations battle the dangers of abuse of privileged accounts, which include tasks such as changing passwords and tampering with log data. By using SIEM for privileged user abuse, you will be able to react to abuses by receiving immediate alerts.
LogSentinel SIEM is designed for privileged account abuse alerts by providing network-wide log monitoring. LogSentinel SIEM is an excellent way to monitor and prevent SAP privilege account abuse, as it has standard features that combine both system and compliance reports, sending alerts that take into consideration privilege escalation and misuse, minimizing or even eliminating any detrimental effects on your business.
Insider Threats
Detect malicious insider activities using rules and behavior analysis. By using SIEM software such as LogSentinel SIEM, you will get alerts on unauthorized or unusual access to SAP system resources at a business application control point.
LogSentinel SIEM determines, using what system logs, what is the process step that is performed during this access (for example, what activity is the person conducting which task or who is using what system or SAP system instance). Based on this data, the use case determines if the access to SAP is considered suspicious or not
Even if a system cannot be accessed when the SAP system is being used for authorizSQL Injection (SQLi): Find Out What Are the Best Practices for Real-Time Detection and Data Breach Prevention access, the system still has to be protected from unauthorized access. For example, if the company uses the SAP system to send emails, the company does not want any person to directly send mail via the SAP system when that person is not actually authorized.
Suspicious Configurations
Monitor and detect unauthorized or suspicious configuration changes, or any unusual events—for example, the occurrence of unauthorized modifications to data from the SAP system.
By using SIEM software, your security team can make a connection to the access source and what is the reason this access can be taken (for example, by SAP system, by a vendor, by an external system, etc.).
How to integrate LogSentinel SIEM with your SAP software?
LogSentinel SIEM can collect data from everywhere. Because of the flexibility of our collector, we can collect anything that generates logs, transposing the data into a human-readable format available for searching.
This way, your security team will not only have access to all the SAP logs, but they will also be able to co-relate actions of users across all the other systems.
Denitsa Stefanova is a Senior IT Business Analyst with solid experience in Marketing and Data Analytics. She is involved in IT projects related to marketing and data analytics software improvements, as well as the development of effective methods for fraud and data breach prevention. Denitsa supports her IT-related experience by applying her skills into her everyday duties, including IT and quality auditing, detecting IT vulnerabilities, and GDPR-related gaps.
