Oracle Security Blog

With the start of the new year, it is now time to think about Oracle Critical Patch Updates for 2016.  Oracle releases security patches in the form of Critical Patch Updates (CPU) each quarter (January, April, July, and October).  These patches include important fixes for security vulnerabilities in the Oracle E-Business Suite and its technology stack.  The CPUs are only available for certain versions of the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Database, therefore, advanced planning is required to ensure supported versions are being used and potentially mitigating controls may

Several clients and partners have asked for this checklist lately. Posting it for those who may find it useful:

A question we have answered a few times in the last few months is whether or not, and if so, how easy do Database Activity Monitoring (DAM) tools such as IBM Guardium support ERP platforms such as the Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and SAP. The answer is yes; DAM tools can support ERP systems. For example, IBM Guardium has out-of-the-box policies for both the E-Business Suite and SAP – see figures one and two below.

Come see Integrigy's session at Collaborate 2015 in Las Vegas (http://collaborate.ioug.org/). Integrigy is presenting the following paper:

IOUG #763
Detecting and Stopping Cyber Attacks against Oracle Databases
Monday, April 13th, 9:15 - 11:30 am
North Convention, South Pacific J

With the recent news about yet another database breach of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Integrigy had a discussion with a client about how to better protect the PII data of their executives.

Most clients do not fully take advantage of their database auditing and logging features. These features are sophisticated and are able to satisfy most organization’s compliance and security requirements. 

Several standard features of the Oracle database should be kept in mind when considering what alerts and correlations are possible when combining Oracle database and application log and audit data.

Oracle E-Business Suite environments may be vulnerable due to excessive privileges granted on the SYS.DUAL table to PUBLIC.  This security issue has been resolved in the January 2015 Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU).

On January 24, Oracle published additional information regarding this security issue in My Oracle Support Note 1964164.1.  Revoking of these privileges may cause “subtle timestamp corruptions” in the database unless database patch 19393542 is applied.

Oracle Audit Vault 12c includes a standard interface for BMC Remedy ticketing systems.  You can configure the Oracle Audit Vault to connect to BMC Remedy Action Request (AR) System Server 7.x.  This connection enables the Oracle Audit Vault to raise trouble tickets in response to Audit Vault alerts. 

Oracle E-Business Suite environments may be vulnerable due to excessive privileges granted on the SYS.DUAL table to PUBLIC.  This security issue has been resolved in the January 2015 Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU) and has been assigned the CVE tracking identifier CVE-2015-0393.  The problem may impact all Oracle E-Business Suite versions including 11.5, 12.0, 12.1, and 12.2.  Recent press reports have labeled this vulnerability as a “major misconfiguration flaw.”  The security issue is actually broader than just the INDEX privilege that is being reported in the press

The Oracle Audit Vault has seeded reports for the following compliance and legislative requirements – no additional license is required.

• Payment Card Industry (PCI)
• Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)
• Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
• Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
• United Kingdom Data Protection Act (DPA)

For each compliance statue, following table lists the included reports available –

Oracle E-Business Suite 12.0 Extended Support ends on January 31, 2015.  Sustaining Support does not include security fixes in the form of Critical Patch Updates (CPU).  The final 12.0 CPU will be the January 2015 CPU released on January 20th.

Oracle E-Business Suite 12.0 customers should be looking to upgrade to 12.1 or 12.2 in the near future.

Custom reports can be created in Oracle Audit Vault using Oracle BI Publisher.  BI Publisher is an add-on to Microsoft Word and can be used to modify or create new reports.

For example, to modify a new report, to meet specific corporate or internal audit needs, download a standard Oracle Audit Vault report that is similar (Auditor -> Reports -> Custom Reports -> Uploaded Reports).  Click on the icon to download both the template and the report definition and load both files into BI Publisher.

The Oracle Audit Vault by default installs over one-hundred (100) reports.  This includes core audit reports as well as compliance reports. Reporting is a key feature of the Oracle Audit Vault and one which well-built as evidenced by the use of BI Publisher to allow for easy modification and creation of new reports.

Audit Reports

The audit reporting bundle installed by the default has the following categories –

The Oracle Audit Vault uses Plug-Ins to define data sources.  The following table summarizes several of the important facts about the Oracle Audit Vault database plug for Oracle databases –