New malware variant suggests cybercriminals targeting SAP users

A new variant of a Trojan program that targets online banking accounts also contains code to search if infected computers have SAP client applications installed, suggesting that attackers might target SAP systems in the future.

The malware was discovered a few weeks ago by Russian antivirus company Doctor Web, which shared it with researchers from ERPScan, a developer of security monitoring products for SAP systems.

“We’ve analyzed the malware and all it does right now is to check which systems have SAP applications installed,” said Alexander Polyakov, chief technology officer at ERPScan. “However, this might be the beginning for future attacks.”

When malware does this type of reconnaissance to see if particular software is installed, the attackers either plan to sell access to those infected computers to other cybercriminals interested in exploiting that software or they intend to exploit it themselves at a later time, the researcher said.

Polyakov presented the risks of such attacks and others against SAP systems at the RSA Europe security conference in Amsterdam on Thursday.

To his knowledge, this is the first piece of malware targeting SAP client software that wasn’t created as a proof-of-concept by researchers, but by real cybercriminals.

SAP client applications running on workstations have configuration files that can be easily read and contain the IP addresses of the SAP servers they connect to. Attackers can also hook into the application processes and sniff SAP user passwords, or read them from configuration files and GUI automation scripts, Polyakov said.

There’s a lot that attackers can do with access to SAP servers. Depending on what permissions the stolen credentials have, they can steal customer information and trade secrets or they can steal money from the company by setting up and approving rogue payments or changing the bank account of existing customers to redirect future payments to their account, he added.

There are efforts in some enterprise environments to limit permissions for SAP users based on their duties, but those are big and complex projects. In practice most companies allow their SAP users to do almost everything or more than what they’re supposed to, Polyakov said.

Even if some stolen user credentials don’t give attackers the access they want, there are default administrative credentials that many companies never change or forget to change on some instances of their development systems that have snapshots of the company data, the researcher said.

With access to SAP client software, attackers could steal sensitive data like financial information, corporate secrets, customer lists or human resources information and sell it to competitors. They could also launch denial-of-service attacks against a company’s SAP servers to disrupt its business operations and cause financial damage, Polyakov said.

SAP customers are usually very large enterprises. There are almost 250,000 companies using SAP products in the world, including over 80 percent of those on the Forbes 500 list, according to Polyakov.

If timed correctly, some attacks could even influence the company’s stock and would allow the attackers to profit on the stock market, according to Polyakov.

Dr. Web detects the new malware variant as part of the Trojan.Ibank family, but this is likely a generic alias, he said. “My colleagues said that this is a new modification of a known banking Trojan, but it’s not one of the very popular ones like ZeuS or SpyEye.”

However, malware is not the only threat to SAP customers. ERPScan discovered a critical unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in SAProuter, an application that acts as a proxy between internal SAP systems and the Internet.

A patch for this vulnerability was released six months ago, but ERPScan found that out of 5,000 SAProuters accessible from the Internet, only 15 percent currently have the patch, Polyakov said. If you get access to a company’s SAProuter, you’re inside the network and you can do the same things you can when you have access to a SAP workstation, he said.