Mobile Application Security

In the recent past, there has been an increase in the use of mobile devices that made organizations adopt mobile applications to enable them to effectively interact with their clients. Similarly, mobile applications have become instrumental in our day to day activities in seeking opportunities (Watanabe et al., 2017). However, mobile applications has introduced risk in the process.

Increasing threats and attacks associated with mobile malware

According to Wang et al. (2015), there have been reports on the increasing threats and the overall attacks associated with mobile malware. Mobile applications have become highly lucrative making them viable target to attacks and threat by the actors. On the same front, there has been an increased in the number of unofficial stores where people download applications that are not managed by the developers. Most of these stores require that mobile devices that are rooted increasing the chance of being exploited by malicious actors. Additional, there have been cases whereby infected applications have fond their ways into official stores. Therefore, official stores are not risk-free after all.

Preventing and protecting against mobile application threats

To prevent and protect such threats, the users should be well informed of the lurking threats posed by mobile applications. Apart from downloading applications from Google App Store and Apple App Store, the users should avoid downloading from third-part stores, giving intrusive permission to applications and purchasing the cracked version of the original application. He and Guizani (2015) cited that, organization should ensure that their applications are up to date, blocking of the old version, blocking rooted device, resetting passwords and avoiding sanction applications. In conclusion, with the increased mobile device users, there is expected projection in the number of malware actor. Such actors are capable of stealing valuable information and property, damaging brand reputation of a company and diverting revenue. Therefore, people should understand what is going on with their applications.

References

He, D., Chan, S., & Guizani, M. (2015). Mobile application security: malware threats and defenses. IEEE Wireless Communications, 22(1), 138-144.

Wang, H., Zhang, Y., Li, J., Liu, H., Yang, W., Li, B., & Gu, D. (2015, December). Vulnerability assessment of OAuth implementations in Android applications. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (pp. 61-70). ACM.

Watanabe, T., Akiyama, M., Kanei, F., Shioji, E., Takata, Y., Sun, B., & Mori, T. (2017, May). Understanding the origins of mobile app vulnerabilities: A large-scale measurement study of free and paid apps. In Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2017 IEEE/ACM 14th International Conference on (pp. 14-24). IEEE.