Over Half Of SAP Servers On The Internet Are Vulnerable To Attack, Researcher Says

A researcher has discovered a critical set of security vulnerabilities that afflicts more than half of SAP servers on the Internet.

At the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas this week, SAP security expert Alexander Polyakov will outline a new issue he has found with the industry's most popular enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, SAP.

The new class of vulnerabilities could enable an attacker to gain control of a company's financial flow, providing the path for espionage, sabotage, or fraud, Polyakov says in a press release.

The flaw, which Polyakov foun in the J2EE engine of SAP's NetWeaver software, allows and attacker to bypass authorization checks. "For example, it is possible to create a user and assign him to the administrators' group using two unauthorized requests to the system, the release states. The attack works even when systems are protected by two-factor authentication.

To prove the vulnerability, researchers from Polyakov's company, ERPScan, created a program that detects SAP servers on the Internet. More than half of the servers detected with this new program displayed the authorization vulnerability.

"During our research, we detected several examples [of the vulnerability] in the standard system configuration," Polyakov states in the release. "And because each company customizes the system under its own business processes, new examples of vulnerabilities of the given class can be potentially detected at each company in the future."

ERPScan is offering a free program that can detect the vulnerabilities.

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