SAP Security In The Age Of AI

Uploaded on 2025-08-18 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-IT & Telecoms

The AI revolution has empowered businesses in extraordinary ways, and unfortunately, it has also empowered cyber criminals in extraordinary ways, too.

For businesses, AI has automated tasks, enhanced decision-making, improved customer experiences, and boosted innovation. Operations have been streamlined, customer interactions have been personalized, and valuable data insights for strategic planning have been provided.

For cybercriminals, AI has allowed novice hackers to conduct sophisticated attacks at scale. For them, AI has automated labor-intensive tasks, personalized their attacks, allowed them to evade detection, and accelerated their operations. Hackers can prompt malware to modify its code, execution patterns, and communication methods, thereby bypassing security measures.

Highly convincing phishing emails and messages can now be generated by AI, which analyzes employee social media accounts, to launch vast quantities of these messages in a matter of hours. Realistic deepfake videos enhance these phishing attempts, and voice clones are becoming new tools in hackers' toolboxes.

SAP Systems

Enterprise systems powered by SAP are valuable targets for cyber criminals. These systems manage processes like finance, human resources, supply chain, and customer relations. Financial records, customer data, employee details, and intellectual property are the types of information that cybercriminals want to get their hands on. SAP systems, unfortunately, can have vulnerabilities in configurations, custom code, and interfaces.

Overly permissive access controls or unsecured interfaces can be exploited, and unpatched systems make SAP publicly vulnerable to known exploits. Hackers leveraging AI don’t need to acquire vast SAP expertise; using AI, they can:

Conduct massive scans for misconfigured SAP gateways, message servers, or SAP vulnerabilities opened by misconfigurations.

Analyze large volumes of ABAP, JavaScript, or kernel code for vulnerabilities.

Use language models to generate and test potential exploits.

Automate lateral movement across SAP landscapes.

The flip side to the hacking dilemma is that businesses are also leveraging AI for their own cybersecurity purposes.

Defending SAP environments has traditionally been a painstaking and manual effort. However, defenders adopting AI-powered security techniques are helping to level the playing field. AI could shift power back into the hands of defenders. Forward-thinking SAP security teams can harness AI’s capabilities across several dimensions, such as:

1. Proactive Vulnerability Management:

Defenders are able to:

More intelligently scan custom ABAP code for insecure patterns.

Recommend secure coding alternatives.

Automate patch impact analysis and testing.

This proactive management enables the ability to identify and fix vulnerabilities quickly and effectively before they are exploited.

2. Behavioral Threat Detection:

Traditional SAP security monitoring relies on signatures and static rules. AI, on the other hand, can:

Go deeper to detect anomalies in user behavior in a fraction of the time.

Learn and adapt to evolving attack techniques.

By training on massive datasets, AI can uncover early-stage intrusions that humans and legacy tools typically miss.

3. Automated Response and Orchestration:

AI can support real-time responses to threats and:

Recommend remediation steps based on attack patterns.

Prioritize alerts with contextual understanding.

Trigger automated lockdowns when privilege escalation is detected.

This reduces dwell time, allowing defenders to respond within seconds, not hours or days.

A Force Multiplier

For defenders, AI is a force multiplier. As it matures, those working in SAP security will realize notable gains:

Scale: AI enables one security analyst to protect thousands of endpoints and SAP instances.

Precision: Machine learning improves over time, minimizing false positives and surfacing real threats.

Speed: Automated threat detection and remediation compress the vulnerability-to-patch window and exploit-to-remediation window to near real-time.

Accessibility: Tools that once required elite expertise are now becoming user-friendly and embedded in modern SAP security platforms.

As more enterprises integrate AI into their security workflows and SAP vendors embed it in native tooling, we can expect a future where defenders no longer play catch-up; they will set the pace.

Conclusion

AI is a mighty new tool for those working in SAP security. Today, attackers are exploiting AI to scale their efforts and outpace defenders. However, the tide is shifting. With the right investments and mindset, AI can help SAP defenders change from reactive to proactive, from overwhelmed to empowered.

The future of SAP security won’t be decided by who has the most sophisticated tools - it will be decided by who adapts the fastest. Leveraging AI, defenders are better poised to thwart a hacker's attempts.

Image: Ideogram

Joris van de Vis is Director Security Research at SecurityBridge

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