Despite the obvious productivity benefits, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is prone to all kinds of cybersecurity threats — ransomware, phishing attacks, traffic interception, structured query language (SQL) attacks, and social engineering.
To safeguard company data and processes, one must patch out the vulnerabilities (think of them as loopholes) that threat actors exploit to sneak into your system. But how?
By preparing an ERP system vulnerability report — a detailed security assessment that tells you where the weak points are, how to close them, and how to prevent them.
Find out what an ERP system vulnerability report is, how threat actors target ERP software, and how to protect your business.
What is an ERP system vulnerability report?
An ERP system vulnerability report is a written document that outlines the identified threats in an ERP system. Cybersecurity experts typically prepare these reports and communicate the results of their threat assessment tests to internal stakeholders. The report outlines the potential threats that exist in an ERP system and how best to address those threats.
Through careful planning and execution, these reports can help businesses better understand their security posture and take the necessary steps to eliminate risks. For example, a report may recommend cybersecurity training for employees or software reconfigurations.
How do threat actors target ERP systems?
Threat actors use many tools, methods, and technologies to exploit ERP systems. They may employ social engineering tactics, posing as authority figures to convince unsuspecting victims to share their login credentials or transfer funds to a new bank account.
Below are the following exploits that an ERP system vulnerability report may point out.
Untrained employees
Many of your employees may have access to large amounts of sensitive personal and business data, such as customer and employee records, invoices, and tax statements. However, just 35% of working adults receive cybersecurity training related to phishing emails — when threat actors trick users into giving away sensitive information by impersonating an organization.
This makes your employees prime targets for threat actors who may try to imitate upper management or vendors to coerce your employees into performing security-compromising acts.
Cybersecurity training effectively teaches employees how to spot the signs of an attempted breach, minimizing the risk of a successful attack.
Unmonitored backup procedures
Protecting your backup data is just as important as protecting your original data. Unfortunately, threat actors often target a company’s backup procedures to gain backdoor access to files and systems that would be otherwise difficult to reach through upfront measures.
A common tactic threat actors use is encrypting data with time-sensitive ransomware. Once the data is backed up, the ransomware activates, preventing the company from accessing the backed-up data. That is until they retrieve the encryption key, which the threat actor may hold at ransom in exchange for a large lump sum payment.
Weak password policies
Companies with weak or non-existent password policies make creating easily guessable passwords easy for their employees. These include:
- Using passwords that lack special characters or numbers
- Sharing the same password across multiple accounts
- Creating passwords that relate to one’s personal or employment details.
As a result, threat actors can use specialist tools and tactics to guess weak passwords, such as dictionary (also known as brute force) attacks. This is when a threat actor uses a database of words and a piece of software, running through as many password combinations as possible until the software finds a match.
Outdated software
Outdated software and plugins are a major cybersecurity risk to companies. When a software vendor identifies one or more possible security risks, they address these issues with routine updates and patches. However, customers may be exposed to potential threats if they fail to authorize these updates. For this reason, your company must keep your software up to date.
One of the best ways to mitigate risk is to entrust your software updates to a reputable third-party support provider like Spinnaker Support. Through routine monitoring and maintenance, we keep your software secure and up to date. Plus, we can save you and your employees valuable time, enabling you to focus on core business activities.
What is the cost of an unsecured ERP system?
An unsecured ERP system can be devastating to a business.
The average global cost of a data breach in 2023 is $4.45 million, a 15% increase from three years prior in 2020. Companies that prioritize incident response (IR) planning and testing can save up to $1.49 million compared to those with no IR strategy.
Time is another cost factor when dealing with data breaches.
Unfortunately, many companies fall short of addressing data breaches swiftly. The mean number of days for a company to identify a data breach is 204 days, and the average time to contain a breach is about 73 days.
Our flagship security solution, Spinnaker Shield, takes a holistic approach to vulnerability management for ERP systems. Using the latest tools and technology, we continually investigate and strengthen your ERP system, identifying and resolving any weaknesses in your IT ecosystem before they can be exploited. We also prioritize compliance, adjusting the necessary controls to ensure that your system is up to date with the latest standards.
What are the top risks and resolutions for ERP systems?
A good ERP system vulnerability report will clearly and briefly outline the identified security risks in an ERP system. The report will also propose solutions to address those identified security risks. By doing so, stakeholders can incorporate the required measures to mitigate risk and strengthen ERP security.
Spinnaker Shield services include highly experienced security professionals who continually investigate and provide a clear analysis for your ERP systems, ensuring nothing is missed, particularly in weak spots. We use a Defense in Depth approach, meaning our systems take a holistic approach to ensure all risks are mitigated. We always are striving to improve our processes, and we always use best practices to ensure you stay compliant.
Here are four common ERP security risks and their associated solutions.
Complicated ERP systems
Depending on the size and scale of a business, an ERP system may consist of various interconnected elements. These may include official vendor and third-party applications, legacy infrastructure, cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms, databases, and more. Managing all these components while tracking the data journey (where it’s coming from and where it’s going) can be incredibly challenging.
One way to simplify your ERP system is to approach a third-party support provider — one that can perform a thorough, objective analysis of your ERP system.
When you approach Spinnaker Support, our engineers will review your hardware and software configurations, monitor data flows, identify vulnerabilities, and more. Our team can help you identify opportunities to streamline existing workflows, simplify data flow, and embrace automation to reduce unnecessary manual labor.
We are also up to date with the best practices for ERP migration, so we can help you move your existing ERP solution to a new vendor or environment that better suits your needs.
Non-compliance
Regulatory compliance is the essence of a successful ERP system.
Government, industry, and international agencies enforce a wide range of policies that businesses must follow to operate safely, ethically, and legally. And regarding ERP system governance, data security, and privacy are two of the most important. Failing to follow these standards may increase the risk of data breaches and paying penalties.
To achieve regulatory compliance and prevent data breaches, become familiar with the relevant standards that apply to your region and industry. For example, suppose your business is subject to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provisions. In that case, any data collected from the EU must be stored on EU servers — or in a jurisdiction with similar data sovereignty laws.
Misconfigured data access controls
Poor data access controls can make it easy for threat actors to guess weak passwords, breach active sessions, and commit social engineering to trick unsuspecting employees into sharing login credentials.
If these issues are identified in an ERP system vulnerability report, then consider these remedial solutions:
- Enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA): This means employees have to provide more than one form of identity to access their accounts. This way, even if a threat actor successfully guesses a password, the additional security layer will prevent them from moving forward.
- Limit the number of login attempts. This will prevent threat actors from performing dictionary or brute force attacks.
- Use role-based access controls. This involves giving your employees different levels of access and permissions based on their roles. This will limit the data and processes a threat actor can access, even if they successfully breach an account.
Spinnaker Support can evaluate your existing ERP system — or help you deploy a new one — and properly configure your data access controls. This ensures that only authorized personnel can access the data that they need in your system to work efficiently, minimizing the risk of unauthorized threat actors accessing your system.
We can also keep your access controls up to date as your organization undergoes changes, whether it be onboarding new employees onto the system, removing employees no longer associated with the company, and much more.
Cross-site scripting
A cross-site scripting (XSS) attack is when a threat actor injects malicious code into an otherwise safe website or web app. The code, which can change the appearance of a site or app, may trick another end user into executing the malicious code. Activating the code may allow the threat actor to hijack the user’s browser session.
Conduct a thorough code review if an ERP system vulnerability report identifies an XSS risk. Look for instances where an HTTP request may allow a user to submit malicious JavaScript code. Pay particular attention to custom code. If the quality of the custom code is poor, it may present vulnerabilities that threat actors can exploit to access your ERP system. Consider security patching, which involves making code changes to strengthen the security posture of your software system.
At Spinnaker Support, we take a number of preventative measures to deal with vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting and many more. Our security assessments identify all kinds of weaknesses, both big and small. We also propose viable solutions to mitigate the risk of such weaknesses compromising your system, with hardening techniques and configuration adjustments being two of the most effective defense measures.
How can Spinnaker Support help protect your ERP systems?
If you’re dissatisfied with the quality of your direct vendor support, consider switching to a third-party support provider that cares about your satisfaction.
By combining personalized support with continuous monitoring, maintenance, and support for multiple software vendors, you can preserve your unique customizations and configurations and enjoy peace of mind that your ERP system is safe and secure.
In addition, you get to establish a custom upgrade cycle. This allows you to stick with the versions of your ERP software that you’re comfortable using now. This way, you can upgrade to the newest versions when ready — not when your vendor forces you to.
Here are some other reasons to switch to Spinnaker Support.
Personalized support
We take your success personally.
We take the time to familiarize ourselves with your unique ERP system. This includes your unique installations, customizations, and business processes. So, when you request technical support, we promptly identify and address the source of your issue while preserving your custom code and configurations.
We also provide custom ERP software development services, offering a tailored solution that aligns with your business requirements. You can even access our detailed security bulletins, which keep you up-to-date on the latest product vulnerabilities and best practices for hardening defenses and mitigating risk.
Continuous monitoring and maintenance
Spinnaker Support offers 24/7 proactive monitoring and maintenance to keep your ERP system running smoothly. For example, we can run CIS benchmark scans to ensure you’re performing to high-quality standards and meeting compliance requirements.
You also have round-the-clock access to level 2 and 3 engineers, who can escalate your matter to a level 4 engineer to handle more complicated issues.
Support for Oracle, Microsoft, JD Edwards, SAP, and more
Are you a dedicated Oracle, Microsoft, or JD Edwards customer? Perhaps you use a combination of all three vendors and software products by other vendors? Regardless of your technology stack, Spinnaker Support has you covered.
Our highly skilled engineers support both single and multi-vendor ERP systems. We ensure that your ERP software can seamlessly communicate and share data, no matter how disparate. We can also help you build and deploy new ERP software and decommission outdated or unnecessary software.
Whichever ERP system you use, our priority is to enhance your overall security posture, and to do so in a way that aligns with your short and long-term business objectives. Additionally, we give you the freedom to transform on your own schedule, enabling you to focus on what you do best and upgrade to newer versions when the time is right for you.
Strengthen your ERP security with Spinnaker Support
No ERP software is 100% secure.
However, preparing an ERP system vulnerability report can help you identify and mitigate security risks and achieve regulatory compliance. Third-party support from Spinnaker Support can help you achieve your ERP security goals.
Spinnaker Support provides services to keep your ERP software always available, secure, and up-to-date while allowing you to scale to meet changing demand and maintain your competitive edge. Your Spinnaker Support team can work alongside your existing IT support team or fully control your ERP software, meaning you only deal with one trusted vendor.
Secure your ERP software with Spinnaker Support today. Have an ERP expert contact you today.
