SAPocalypse for Commanders: Logistics Killed Quietly
In hot wars you don’t need to bomb a depot to cripple an army—you poison the ERP that runs it.
Exploit code for SAP NetWeaver’s Visual Composer went public on Aug 15, 2025. It chains an unauth RCE with an insecure deserialization gadget. Patches exist, but public weaponization changes the game from “vuln” to force-projection.
What that means in operational terms (T+72 hrs):
MRO & spares orders stall; aircraft/armor readiness rates fall without a shot fired.
Fuel & POL accounting drifts; convoys miss windows; refuel plans desync.
Payroll & vendor rails jam; contractors stop showing up; black-market prices spike.
Tasking & approvals get sabotaged by quiet data edits; no alarms, just entropy.
This isn’t hypothetical. CISA put CVE-2025-31324 in KEV for active exploitation; follow-on waves already deploy Linux backdoors from SAP beachheads. Living-off-the-land = fileless persistence inside “trusted” SAP processes. You won’t see it by chasing one more webshell.
Why this is a fatality (no “going back” to business-as-usual):
1. Unauthenticated RCE on a core business stack. (Visual Composer metadata uploader)
2. Gadgetized deserialization that adapts to NetWeaver versions.
3. No runtime behavioral attestation in SAP—once inside, the system cannot prove its own integrity. (Onapsis documents webshell-less compromise patterns.)
Command decision: stop trusting state; start verifying behavior.
Behavior-Driven Verification (BDV) with DamageBDD—what “integrity under fire” looks like:
Mission workflows as executable specs (e.g., “Fuel issue + dispatch + receipt”): green only when end-to-end behavior matches spec; red when anything deviates.
Continuous checks at the edges (API calls, job runners, schedulers), not just snapshots of patch level.
Tamper-evident attestations of every pass/fail to an immutable log so integrity is auditable after breach.
Tripwires: if SAP starts “living off the land” (unexpected curls, certutil, classpaths), BDV fails hard and alerts—before the sortie count drops.
Seven-day battle drill (minimal politics, maximum effect):
1. Patch both SAP notes: 3594142 (31324) and 3604119 (42999).
2. Scan & hunt now with the Onapsis+Mandiant open-source assess tools; treat positives as compromise.
3. Kill exposure to /developmentserver/metadatauploader anywhere it still exists.
4. Segment & rate-limit SAP from internet and non-mission subnets.
5. Stand up BDV (DamageBDD) guards on 3 mission-critical workflows: Fuel, MRO, Payables.
6. Rotate creds & re-key anything touched; assume lateral movement.
7. Exercise the rollback for contaminated instances; measure MTTR against BDV alerts.
War is logistics. Your ERP is a battlespace. If you can’t prove it behaves correctly under attack, you’ve already lost tempo.
#SAPocalypse #NationalSecurity #HybridWarfare #VerifyDontTrust #BehaviorVerification #DamageBDD