Key points from Google and Accenture's ransomware white paper

The white paper "Ransomware State of Mind: How to Better Protect Your Business" by Google and Accenture outlines the current state of ransomware, its impact on businesses, and solutions to address this growing problem. Ransomware is a type of malicious software that restricts users' access to important data until a ransom is paid. The report covers various aspects such as social engineering, phishing, remote desktop/terminal protocol (RDP), and software vulnerabilities as common methods for delivering ransomware. The impact of ransomware can be significant, leading to loss of access to data, incident response and mitigation costs, litigation costs, loss of revenue, employee layoffs, brand and reputation damage, and even business closure in some cases. High-profile ransomware attacks include those on Colonial Pipeline, JBS Foods, and CD Projekt. Key learnings from the white paper emphasize that ransomware spreads in phases, making it crucial for companies to implement zero trust security measures. This involves securing trusted perimeters (STPs), using multi-factor authentication (MFA), and implementing single sign-on (SSO). Additionally, protecting in-house apps with secure code review, static application testing (SAST), and software composition analysis (SCA) is essential. Managing infrastructure as code (IaC) with GitOps can also help automate infrastructure security. Automating security policy and testing using tools like Snyk's policy as code engine enables the creation of a unified, consistent single source of truth for policies from code to cloud. Strategies such as ensuring security principles have been applied to all three security layers (PaaS overlay, platform, and foundation), shifting security left using SAST and SCA automation, leveraging a Value Stream Delivery Platform, and testing and validating source code, open source libraries and dependencies, attestations, and deployed artifacts can help minimize the threat of ransomware.