Mobile Application Security – Avoid a Root Canal Procedure

Mobile applications are now the lifeblood of your business. You rely on them to engage and serve your customers. But are your mobile development and security teams empowered to support your digital-first strategy?

Why Are Mobile Application So Insecure?

The growing work from home environment and proliferating mobile applications have made the traditional layered security approach of defending the perimeter obsolete. The perimeter, as we knew it, has effectively dissolved. Unfortunately, investment in mobile application security has taken a back seat to other pressing IT priorities, leading to insecure mobile applications deployed in production environments.

OWASP’s Top 10 list of mobile vulnerabilities include:

• Insufficient jailbreak/root detection
• Insecure data storage
• information leakage
• Sensitive data exposure
• Insufficient authentication
• Insufficient session expiration
• User enumeration vulnerability
• Insufficient code obfuscation

AppSec Training for Developers

Most mobile developers come from the web development world, where applications reside behind a firewall and there are strong security guard rails in place. They lack knowledge of mobile application security best practices and mobile security testing. They are also under pressure to deliver innovation at the speed of DevOps.

Relying on overworked security teams to fix vulnerabilities in mobile apps can slow down your DevOps cadence and lead to friction between development and security teams. Developer-centric AppSec training is a key first step for ensuring mobile application security.

Train your developers on vulnerabilities, like the OWASP Mobile Top 10 and OWASP API Top 10, to shift security left and build secure-by-design mindset in your engineering team.

Minimize the Risk of Mobile Data Breaches

Recent mobile application data breaches at companies, like Walgreens, Babylon Health, secret sharing application Whisper, LinkedIn, and T-Mobile, highlight the need for enterprises to invest in mobile application security testing as a key component of their application security program.

Mobile applications collect a lot of Personally Identifiable Information (PII), like usernames and passwords, and device-specific information, including device serial number, geolocation data, etc. Usage of these data are governed by tough data privacy laws, like GDPR and CCPA.

Thus, it is imperative for developers to focus on security and privacy-by-design aspects in the application development phase or risk significant penalties and reputational damage for sensitive data exposure.

Is Your Mobile Application Security Playing Catch Up?

According to Comscore data, over 69% of all digital traffic has moved to the mobile channel versus the web app. Mobile apps are now truly the lifeblood of your digital business.

Are you ready to raise the bar on mobile application security with mobile developer centric AppSec training?