How Security Risks Can Impact Your Mobile App

Wondering why you should bother to protect an application against malicious programs? To start with, we’d like to give you one key reason to underline the security’s significance: a business-like app has a direct bearing on the reputation of an organization in question. You’ll endanger your company’s name if you don’t take malware seriously.

Simply picture such a situation.

When a service owner makes the mistake to opt not the most robust security strategies, users’ information could get easily stolen, and web fraudsters will happily take advantage of it. Eventually, customers will figure out the true causes of those unfortunate events, thus, the service owner will lose credibility of people, plus their reputation will be tarnished.

Are you dealing with financial mobile servicing? Then m-security turns to be even more critical, since clients won’t appreciate the financial details – and, consequently, their money – being stolen. We support you wouldn’t like to be blamed for any losses, would you?

Air Canada’s bitter experience proves that even one tiny security gap can cause 20.000 users’ have their personal data stolen. So, let’s talk about security weak spots and how they might affect your m-service.

Major security vulnerabilities

We shall discuss key security vulnerable areas one by one to find out the cost of ignoring them.

Inadequate authentication

To start enjoying a new service a user shall get authenticated and authorized. Such steps are mandatory for ensuring the robust protection of customers’ private info.

Users’ authentication serves for proving the identity of a specific individual. In its course, the account info shall be verified. And as a precaution, if passwords or any other verification details are entered improperly, a service shall lockdown.

The next phase of mobile app security is the users’ authorization. After a user’s identity is confirmed, a system determines what services are accessible for that user. In the case of big organizations, top management has wider access to varied features compared to usual staff members.

It goes without saying that authentication/authorization processes must be treated with full responsibility. Every authenticated person shall NOT access a complete set of functionalities.

A great idea could be to occasionally perform authenticating procedures making sure you have verified people, instead of cyber intruders.

Lack of server-side supervision

In most cases, applications are designed to be client-server structured. It’s a customers’ task to get a service loaded from Google Play & App Store. Let’s say, purchasing online and reviewing messages also fall within client-part activities.

There’s one more server element on another side (a developers’ one), interacting with users via API. A server part is that component for arranging adequate realization of service functionalities.

Five years ago weaknesses of servers seemed to be the most hazardous to m-security. Despite the fact that 2016 has made a big difference, and server-side issues aren’t so critical anymore, the given problem didn’t disappear completely. Statistically, 39% of server compounds cannot boast of having sufficient security, and 36% carry within them severely hazardous blind spots.

User-side issues

The statistics claim that over 60% of all security soft spots are at the users’ end, ⅓ of which has an increased hazard indicator.

Client-side vulnerable points might be of a different kind:

Troubles with authentication

Around 39% of m-services perform users’ authentication on the client-side, meaning, they’re stored on smartphones. The technique is far from being safe since in reality every second application stores identification info inappropriately. Server-side verifications should be more preferable, and all data could be transmitted in a hash-value format.

Contaminated software

In late 2018 there were around 30 mln of malicious software. Such a number is shocking. Those applications provoked an increase in cyber attacks. By the by, having a brand-new device doesn’t guarantee it’s completely safe! Have you heard of the Alcatel gadgets with spyware? People who had no idea of that infection kept purchasing those smartphones.

Sad as it is, frauds can steal the data even without any physical contact with a gadget.

Generally speaking, in providing the most credible and highly-qualified protection, that issue has to be taken care of at a nascent stage.

Bad data retention

And we proceed to the most severe m-security issue – untrustworthy data storing. It matters since data-stealing results in undesirable consequences, including financial ones.

Here’s a little bit more of non-optimistic statistical figures: around 75% of all m-services have unsecured storage of info. That’s also true for sensitive financial details, and it’s a big deal.

An excellent tool to protect data storing, as well as its transferring, would be the encryption. This procedure implies specific info to turn encoded prior to it’s sending, and at the other end, after being received, it shall get decoded.

Undoubtedly, the encrypting technique is a truly reliable and effective method of data security, however, one shall bear in mind that various encoding/decoding technologies provide different levels of performance and effectiveness. A programmer having poor competence in the encryption methods won’t be able to duly protect service against scammers.

Unwitting information leaking

That would be a mistake to ignore the aspect. It’s critical to handle multiple points as to mobile security, even those which concern probable info leakage directly or indirectly.

Here’s an example to prove our point.

There are applications having specific session identifiers that are included in links to files a platform’s managing. A crook can persuade a customer to share that link, and a client can actually do so, not realizing the link has such valuable info. Consequently, fraud will easily act in the name of that user. By protecting a platform from data leaking from the outset, those unwanted situations can be easily prevented.

Although, sorrow can come even by clients’ negligence since so much depends on users’ cautiousness and watchfulness. A leakage issue might be instigated by unsecured program downloading, reckless privilege providing and the like. In this case, after the info leaking a user will have to suffer consequences, thus, he/she shall take the app protection seriously.

Third-party solutions

Diverse API resources will be of excellent assistance while developing a platform. Such solutions speed up various processes and allow app owners to save some money. It turns possible since API provides ready-to-use code elements that you can apply to adopt certain features, for instance, payment systems, streaming services, crypto options, etc.

The broad range of APIs is truly impressive. You get to pick the solution to use among paid and free versions. Everyone will find what suits a particular case the most. Nonetheless, the protection level those APIs offer is different, thus, users’ personal details might be in jeopardy.

Absence of binary security

Planning to design a truly sustainable and secure app? Then you can’t do without binary protection. Disregarding the point will make your service a sitting duck for cyber scammers, as crooks can easily analyze a program to misuse it – the code could be slightly rewritten for selling the app as a supposedly new service. That’d be classic stealing.

Binary security serves to complicate the overall operation, thus, it’s not that simple to hack it.

Having no binary protection might trigger the below-mentioned consequences: