In recent years, mobile apps have surged in popularity providing consumers with instant access to a variety of life essentials such as finances, education, and healthcare to life's pleasures such as shopping, sports, and gaming.
With the popularity of mobile apps reaching new heights, the responsibility to protect mobile users against diverse security threats has become paramount as the attack landscape shifts focus to where most consumers are - mobile apps.
Not only is the level of protection that consumers expect in mobile apps is also on the rise.
Taken together this clearly underscores the pressing need for mobile app developers to deliver enhanced protection in their mobile applications.
Mobile banking apps often fall prey to these attacks, which monitor Accessibility Service events and user activity to harvest transactions, PII, and other valuable data.
In this technique, part of the app screen is covered by a fake and malicious screen that the user is tricked into clicking on or interacting with to commit mobile fraud.
Credential stuffing poses a major risk to mobile banking apps and developers should take note with 4.8 billion people projected to use mobile wallets by 2025.
Even more skilled cybercriminals can use dynamic instrumentation toolkits such as Frida to attach to running processes, hook into applications remotely, and dynamically inject code into memory during runtime, allowing attackers to alter an app's behavior, functionality, logic, and state - all while the app is running.
The next major area of concern is a general lack of sufficient data encryption in mobile apps.
This often includes extremely sensitive API keys and secrets stored in the clear as strings in the app, which would allow for easy extraction or interception of usernames and passwords, both stored in the app, as well as when they traverse a network, such as when a user logs in to a mobile banking app.
Other places where we find an abundance of unprotected data are app preferences, XML strings, and app resources.
As a result, in the name of releasing apps quickly and delivering a smooth user experience, these critical areas of mobile app security are often given short shrift.
Man-in-the-Middle Attacks often target mobile apps belonging to the service, finance, and retail industries.
To secure mobile apps from the above-mentioned threats, implementing a multi-layered security model is crucial.
Leveraging no-code tools empowers them to do just this by better operationalizing mobile app security in the CI/CD pipeline and taking an engineering approach to DevSecOps.
By doing this, developers can leverage tools that provide mobile development and cyber teams with comprehensive, automated systems to build, test, release and monitor security defenses and protections directly into iOS and Android apps during the app development process.
As mobile apps continue to be the apple of U.S. consumers' eye, serving as a gateway to brand relationships, Americans have a growing appetite for advanced protection from malware, hacking, fraud, and other destructive cyber actions.
Security is materializing as the next driving force for mobile app adoption, serving as a pillar for a successful transition into the mobile realm.
Alan Bavosa is the VP of Security Products at Appdome, the leading pioneer in no-code, automated mobile app defense.
He is passionate about helping mobile developers build secure mobile apps rapidly as part of the DevOps CI/CD pipeline.
This Cyber News was published on www.cyberdefensemagazine.com. Publication date: Thu, 14 Dec 2023 06:13:05 +0000