Ransomware assaults, such as the one on Change Healthcare, continue to create serious disruptions. However, they are not inevitable. Software developers can create products that are immune to the most frequent types of cyberattacks used by ransomware gangs. This blog discusses what can be done and encourages customers to demand that software companies take action.
Millions of Americans recently experienced prescription medicine delays or were forced to pay full price as a result of a ransomware assault. While the United States has begun to make headway in reacting to cyberattacks, including the passage of incident reporting requirements into law, it is apparent that much more work remains to be done to combat the ransomware epidemic.
Ransomware gangs flourish because they usually attack genuinely easy weaknesses in software that serve as the basis for critical operations and services.
Providing scalable solutions: Company duty
Business leaders of software manufacturers hold the key: They can build products that are resilient against the most common classes of cyberattacks by ransomware gangs.
The security community has known how to eliminate classes of vulnerabilities across software for decades. What is needed is not perfectly secure software but “secure enough” software, which software manufacturers are capable of creating.n exploit remarkably simple vulnerabilities in software that is the foundation for the essential processes and services.
Systemic classes of defects like SQL injection or insecure default configurations, such as a lack of multi-factor authentication by default or hardcoded default passwords, enable the vast majority of ransomware attacks and are preventable at scale.
The expense of preventing some types of vulnerabilities during the design stage is substantially less than dealing with the complex aftermath of a breach.
According to a recent Google study, it has nearly eliminated many common types of vulnerabilities in its products, such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting. Furthermore, Google claims that such tactics were cost-effective and, in some cases, saved money ultimately as a result of having to worry about bugs.
Fighting lack of action
Inaction is exactly what has occurred in the software business. The Biden administration's National Cybersecurity Strategy asks for a shift in this direction, with software manufacturers accepting responsibility for product security from the start.
For example, whereas conventional vulnerability assessment approaches urge a sequential approach to identifying and patching vulnerabilities one by one, the agency's SQL injection alert promotes software manufacturers' executives to lead codebase reviews and eliminate all potentially unsafe functions to prevent SQL injection at the source.
How to identify bugs
Software vendors may assess vulnerability classes on two levels: impact, or the degree of damage that can be done by that class of vulnerability, and the cost of avoiding that flaw at scale.
SQL injection vulnerabilities are likely to be high in impact but inexpensive in cost to eliminate, whereas memory-safety issues have extremely high impact but need large investments to rewrite codebases systematically. Businesses can create a priority list of the most cost-effective tasks for fixing specific types of flaws in their products.
Customer's role: What can you do?
Companies should ask how their vendors attempt to remove entire classes of threats, such as implementing phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication and developing a memory-safe plan to address the most prevalent type of software vulnerability.
It is feasible that future ransomware assaults may be far more difficult to carry out. It's high time for software businesses to make this possibility a reality and safeguard Americans by including security from the beginning. Customers should insist that they do this.