This partner insight was authored by Jonathan Stross, SAP Security Analyst at Pathlock.
While SAP environments handle complex business processes, serious risks can accumulate out of sight, even when everything appears stable. Configuration weaknesses, malicious transports, or misconfigured roles can quietly open the door to data exposure, audit failures, or worse.
Since 2021, ransomware attacks targeting SAP systems have surged 400%. While external threats are growing, internal exposures, such as configuration weaknesses, vulnerable custom code, and unchecked access, often play just as significant a role.
Addressing these risks requires more than role management or change reviews. Visibility into how access, data, and logic interact across your environment is essential because the biggest problems are usually the ones that slide under the radar.
These hidden risks need to be unearthed and kept top-of-mind, but many organizations are unsure where to start. That’s why Pathlock hosted the “Virtual SAP Security Summit: The Gaps in Your Tools — Hidden Risks, Unsafe Code, and Real-Time Threats” which offered a focused 90-minute session on how to locate and eliminate these threats before they impact your business.
Addressing these risks requires a holistic security approach that prioritizes safeguarding critical data, systems, and processes. Even well-managed SAP environments carry risks that currently don’t disrupt operations but do have the potential to do so if exploited.
Often, teams lack the bandwidth or tooling to surface these issues. Reviewing every object, change, or permission manually doesn’t scale, especially in hybrid environments where development and infrastructure are spread across teams, systems, and time zones. Standard SAP tools provide some oversight, but they often miss the deeper, system-spanning issues that attackers catch quickly.
Pathlock’s Vulnerability Scanning feature offers a powerful layer of protection against these forces. With the ability to flag thousands of known vulnerabilities across your SAP landscape in hours, security teams can focus their attention on addressing patches, misconfigured roles, and unauthorized changes. Pathlock offers unrivaled time-to-protection, delivering actionable results in hours and comprehensive security and risk overviews in as little as 90 minutes.
(And by the way, Summit attendees will receive complimentary access to a limited version of this scanner — an easy way to start evaluating their own environment right after the session. A great reason to register if you haven’t yet.)
But surface-level visibility only goes so far if routine changes are introducing new risks behind the scenes. In many SAP landscapes, vulnerabilities don’t just accumulate but are created during everyday development and deployment. When custom ABAP code or transports are rushed, security controls often fall behind. Without clear approvals and checks, even one misstep—a flawed masking rule, a test system holding production data—can quietly open the door.
Patterns like these are common in environments where development, QA, and production operate in silos. The instinct is often to slow things down or add more review layers, but there’s a better path: automating guardrails that catch risky changes without blocking progress. Examples include leveraging Pathlock’s Code Scanning module to identify vulnerabilities in custom code and using the Transport Control module to block high-risk transports by default. Teams can require on-the-fly approvals only when something truly deviates from policy.
Still, no environment is bulletproof. Security teams increasingly work from the assumption that some level of compromise is inevitable. Early detection and rapid containment become critical in that context.
SAP systems generate rich logs across access, transaction activity, and system behavior, but few teams have the time or tooling to sift through it all. Correlated, real-time monitoring makes the difference.
Pathlock’s Threat Detection and Response capability is designed to support this exact scenario. The platform connects activity data across systems, intelligently filters noise, and delivers alerts when something truly needs attention. It analyzes over 70 log sources against more than 1,500 threat detection signatures, helping teams reduce response time by up to 80% and log noise and false positives by over 60%.
On top of that, if an attacker, unauthorized download, or other malicious behavior is detected, Pathlock’s threat detection and response automatically triggers countermeasures to contain the damage.
And in the moments that matter, Dynamic Access Controls can make a breach far less damaging. Tactics such as Dynamic Data Masking for high-risk users, Data Scrambling for test environments, and Data Loss Prevention for sensitive records proactively contain impact even when prevention fails. These capabilities, powered by Pathlock’s Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) model, ensure that access policies are enforced dynamically based on risk, user role, and context.
Beyond risk prevention, modern SAP teams are under growing pressure to maintain continuous audit readiness. Manual reviews, spreadsheets, and retroactive explanations are simply unsustainable for continuous audit readiness.
Tracking changes to roles, permissions, transports, and policies in real-time enables compliance teams to see how controls are working on a day-to-day basis. Unauthorized changes can be flagged automatically. Segregation-of-duties (SoD) violations can be detected and resolved before they snowball. And when questions arise, teams can show exactly what happened, who approved it, and why it didn’t violate policy.
Pathlock provides this level of compliance visibility across the board. With automated SoD monitoring, built-in audit workflows, and continuous User Access Reviews (UAR), the platform gives teams the tools to prevent violations and explain decisions without adding overhead.
Achieving this balance—anticipating risk, controlling change, monitoring behavior, and proving oversight—is how SAP security becomes not just manageable but sustainable. It’s the shift from fire drills and reactivity to governance by design.
June 26th | 1:00 PM ET / 10:00 AM PT
Take control with Pathlock: register for the Virtual SAP Security Summit here.