Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks pose a significant threat to SAP environments, potentially crippling critical business operations by overwhelming SAP systems with excessive traffic or resource-intensive requests. Given the vital role SAP systems play in enterprises, detecting and mitigating DoS attacks promptly is essential. SAP Enterprise Threat Detection (SAP ETD) offers robust capabilities to identify such attacks in real time and help security teams respond effectively.
This article explores how DoS attacks manifest in SAP landscapes and best practices for detecting them using SAP ETD.
A DoS attack aims to disrupt the availability of SAP systems by exhausting system resources such as CPU, memory, or network bandwidth. Common attack vectors in SAP include:
Such attacks can result in slowed response times, service outages, and operational disruptions impacting critical business processes.
Detecting DoS attacks in SAP is challenging because:
This is where SAP Enterprise Threat Detection becomes invaluable by automating analysis and correlating data in real time.
SAP ETD provides several capabilities tailored to identifying DoS attack indicators:
SAP ETD aggregates events such as login failures, RFC calls, and transaction executions over configurable time windows. Rules can then trigger alerts when thresholds are exceeded, for example:
SAP ETD correlates multiple event types to detect coordinated attack patterns, such as a surge in failed logins followed by an increased load of suspicious transactions.
By establishing baselines for typical user or system behavior, SAP ETD can flag deviations that may indicate a DoS attack, like unusual access patterns or volume spikes outside normal business hours.
ETD can ingest logs from network devices and infrastructure monitoring tools, enabling correlation of SAP-specific events with broader network anomalies typical of DoS attacks.
Denial-of-Service attacks can severely disrupt SAP business operations, making early detection essential. SAP Enterprise Threat Detection equips organizations with powerful tools to monitor, analyze, and respond to DoS threats by leveraging aggregation, correlation, and behavioral analysis techniques tailored for SAP environments.
By understanding how DoS attacks manifest in SAP systems and applying SAP ETD’s advanced detection capabilities, security teams can minimize downtime, safeguard availability, and ensure continuous business process integrity.