Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is a critical tool that helps organizations across various industries consolidate their business operations. It provides a comprehensive suite of integrated business applications that support everything from finance to supply chain management. However, when you combine Oracle’s complexity with the consolidation of all your organization’s crown jewels under one umbrella, using EBS also brings significant security challenges.
Waratek offers a unique, automated approach to instantly addressing both known and unknown EBS vulnerabilities. Our platform allows customers using Oracle’s business suite to secure apps with no downtime, no false positives, and no perceivable performance hits.
Let’s explore what makes EBS so difficult to secure and what measures your business can take to enjoy the benefits of Oracle’s business suite without the security drawbacks.
Understanding Oracle EBS
Oracle EBS is a comprehensive suite of business applications that are highly customizable and scalable. Organizations use it to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and enhance decision-making by providing a unified platform for managing business data and processes.
It includes a wide range of modules including financial management, human resources, supply chain management, project management, and customer relationship management. Each of these modules are interconnected and they all rely on shared data.
This model comes with a number of advantages. Each component of the system is always operating on the same up-to-date information, reducing data processing errors and the latency of business operations. This system can also easily scale with the organization’s growth, accommodating increased transaction and user volumes. Meanwhile, comprehensive reporting and analytics capabilities provide insights into business performance and allow users to easily optimize their processes.
The Challenges of Securing Oracle EBS
However, security and convenience will always be diametrically opposed to some degree. The easier it is for your team to access things inside your network, the easier it tends to be for outsiders to do the same. EBS’s many interplaying components and its extensive customization options make it an incredibly complex system. When not properly managed, this can lead to all sorts of security vulnerabilities, making EBS a prime target for sophisticated cyber-attacks.
Meanwhile, consolidation of systems in this manner — while convenient — inherently goes against the security principle of least privilege. This methodology favors the practice of segmenting systems so that would-be attackers must continually fight for access to each new application and can never kill multiple birds with one exploit.
Each component of EBS, from the Oracle Forms to the Managed Servers, requires specific security measures. Common threats include OS command injection, SQL injection, and session hijacking, which exploit the complex interactions between different EBS modules. Real-world incidents, such as the recent exploits by the 8220 Gang leveraging vulnerabilities like CVE-2017-3506, lay bare the need for creative and effective security measures.
The Need for Specialized Security Solutions
Traditional security solutions like Web Application Firewalls (WAFs), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) tools often fall short in securing Oracle EBS. These tools each come with their own sets of benefits, but the drawbacks are hefty.
Using a platform like Waratek allows organizations using EBS to consolidate security practices the same way they consolidate business practices. These will be context-aware, proactive and scalable to allow businesses to get the most out of EBS.
WAFS
WAFs are a great tool for building a solid perimeter around your applications. They’ll thwart a good number of attempts to compromise your applications. However, they may fail to recognize specific vulnerabilities within the unique configurations of EBS applications, leaving gaps in security. This will also lead to high false positive rates, blocking legitimate traffic along with malicious requests. False positives and negatives disrupt operations and lead to significant administrative overhead in fine-tuning the WAF rules.
Due to their reliance on tuning, WAFs are only there to protect against known threats. This means any zero-day vulnerabilities, such as CVE-2017-3506 or Log4Shell when it was first discovered, will grant attackers access.
What’s more, a WAF is — as the name suggests — a wall. It’s great for keeping traffic out but once an attacker finds a way to bypass it, it won’t be much help. There are also a number of internal threats or attacks that originate within the application environment that WAFs won’t detect.
Traditional WAFs are also incredibly expensive. To place a WAF in front of every individual application is massively cost-prohibitive. The result is a tool that inflates your budget, but will not address all of the issues that lead to security and data breaches.
SAST and DAST Scanners
SAST and DAST Scanners can be quite valuable in the right contexts, too. They’re comprehensive scanning tools that internally handle a lot of what WAFs miss. They run continuously and integrate well with other tools. However, both are limited in scope. SAST tools work during the development phase and DAST tools work after deployment. To use either effectively, you’d have to use both — along with some other tools as well. They also require extensive testing time. The costs of this sort of system add up quickly, particularly in an environment as complex as EBS.
Both SAST and DAST tools lack nuance and contextual awareness. This means that once again, you’re going to get a lot of false positives and negatives. Particularly once the application is up and running, a significant false positive rate creates alert fatigue in security personnel. When your scanners cry wolf one too many times, there comes a point where any individual alert loses its urgency. On the other side, the consequences of false negatives are obvious. If a high priority alert goes unreported, an attacker may have free reign of your application without interference.
Waratek Simplifies Security for Oracle EBS
Waratek addresses each of the security challenges mentioned above with our Java Security Platform, which provides comprehensive protection through Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) technology. In the context of Oracle EBS applications, this means you get comprehensive protection both within and around your applications that can adapt to the complexities of Oracle EBS. This protection is continuous and context-aware meaning it generates zero false positives.
What’s more, these solutions are all part of a single platform, which dramatically reduces costs compared to the alternatives. Using Oracle EBS is intended to make your business more efficient and easier to manage, which is why our platform integrates seamlessly with your applications at runtime and requires very little labor input from your security team.
Waratek’s solutions include advanced input validation and sanitization techniques that neutralize malicious data before it reaches critical processing stages within the application. By implementing context-aware security policies and real-time threat detection, Waratek ensures that threats are identified and mitigated promptly. Each of these events is logged into a library from which security personnel can request specified reports for C-Suite executives or compliance auditors.
Integrating Waratek with Oracle EBS is as easy as deploying Waratek agents across different EBS components. For example, agents can be installed on Oracle Forms and Managed Servers to monitor and protect against threats in real-time. This integration process is streamlined to minimize downtime and performance impact, making it feasible for large-scale deployments. This also scales as easily as EBS itself. When you spin up new applications on your Oracle platform, simply deploy a Waratek agent alongside it and you’ll enjoy continuous protection for the entire lifecycle of the application.
Get Started Today
The complexity of Oracle EBS necessitates specialized security solutions to protect against sophisticated cyber threats. Waratek simplifies this process. Our advanced Security-as-Code platform offers robust, context-aware security measures that are easy to integrate and manage. For organizations looking to secure their Oracle EBS environments, Waratek provides a reliable and effective solution, ensuring comprehensive protection and peace of mind at a fraction of the cost of the alternatives.
