The recent data breach at HealthEquity, a leading health savings account provider, serves as a stark reminder of the growing risks organizations face in safeguarding sensitive data. The incident, which resulted in the exposure of 4.5 million customers’ personally identifiable information (PII), highlights the urgent need for robust data security measures, especially within complex ERP systems like SAP.
The specific system(s) compromised in the HealthEquity breach remain unknown, but the incident underscores the increasing vulnerability of SAP environments to cyberattacks. As businesses increasingly rely on SAP to streamline operations and manage critical business processes, SAP is a more attractive target for threat actors now more than ever. In fact, in 2023 there was a 400% increase in ransomware incidents that involved compromising SAP systems and data at victim’s organizations.
While HealthEquity acted swiftly once they discovered the breach, several lessons are evident from this cyberattack for organizations handling sensitive data.
A key takeaway from the HealthEquity breach is the necessity of knowing exactly where sensitive data resides within your IT landscape. Many organizations are unaware of the extent of sensitive data stored in external repositories, making them vulnerable to unauthorized access.
To mitigate this risk, organizations should:
With a clear understanding of where sensitive data resides in various SAP modules, security teams can take appropriate measures to prioritize the protection of data that is sensitive vs. the data that is not.
The HealthEquity breach highlights the importance of preventing data exposure, even if unauthorized access occurs. Dynamic data masking can help by ensuring that sensitive information is masked or obfuscated, rendering it useless to attackers.
Organizations should:
If the third-party cloud provider had data security controls like Dynamic Data Masking in place, the breach could have been mitigated by ensuring that unauthorized users could only see masked or obfuscated data, rendering it useless even if they accessed the repository.
Strong access control policies are essential to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data. Beyond traditional role-based access control (RBAC), organizations should adopt Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) for more granular authorization.
ABAC allows for:
By dynamically governing access based on user attributes, organizations can minimize the risk of unauthorized access and data leakage.
Pathlock offers a comprehensive suite of tools to help organizations protect their SAP environments from both external and internal threats. These tools include:
Pathlock’s Dynamic Access Controls (DAC) product can help your organization apply and streamline the implementation of these necessary data-centric security controls to prevent a data breach.
By implementing comprehensive data discovery, dynamic data masking, and robust access controls, organizations can significantly reduce their risk of experiencing a data breach similar to the HealthEquity incident. Pathlock’s solutions provide a powerful and effective way to achieve these objectives and safeguard sensitive SAP data.
Get in touch with our SAP security experts to know more.
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