Report Surfaces Sharp Increase in Cyberattacks Aimed at Applications
An analysis of cyberattacks made against applications published this week by Digital.ai, a provider of a platform for securely delivering software, finds a 20% year over year increase, with 83% of applications tracked in January now under constant cyberattack compared to 65% a year ago.
Mobile applications running on Android (90%) and Apple iOS (88%) are by far the most targeted, according to the report. However, the types of attacks being made can vary. For example, open Android platforms (82%) are more susceptible to instrumentation attacks involving dynamic code modification or hooks into toolkits such as Frida, the report noted.
Digital.ai CEO Derek Holt said cyberattacks appear to be specifically targeting the client side of applications that are easier for them to access. Mobile computing applications are especially being targeted in a way that ultimately expands the attack surface that cybersecurity teams are expected to defend, he added.
At the same time, reverse-engineering toolkits such as Frida and Ghidra continue to proliferate at a time when it’s becoming simpler to create malicious code using generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, the report noted.
Organizations now need more than ever a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity that eliminates vulnerabilities both before applications are deployed and after they have been deployed, said Holt.
The challenge is that application security often remains fragmented. Application development teams have more broadly embraced next DevSecOps practices to improve security but responsibility for securing them after they have been deployed generally falls to a cybersecurity team. Those two teams within an organization need to be able to collaborate to resolve application security issues by, for example, developing, testing and applying a software patch before cybercriminals exploit any newly discovered vulnerability or a known one that might have been simply overlooked.
Overall, the report finds attacks aimed at applications serving vertical industries are especially prevalent in the telecommunications (91%), financial services (88%), automotive (86%) and healthcare (79%) sectors.
Regardless of industry sector, application security makes a crucial customer experience difference, said Holt. It’s never been easier for end users to switch from one application to another, something they become more inclined to do each time there is a security incident.
The probability those incidents will occur is also only going to increase in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) as cybercriminals increasingly automate the development and deployment of more sophisticated attacks.
Hopefully, AI advances will also improve the overall state of application security but in the short term, at least, it’s likely these advances might provide more advantages to adversaries than defenders.
In the meantime, there’s plenty of opportunity for organizations to improve application security. The challenge, as always, is finding a way to secure an asset that tends to have a lot of hidden dependencies that are not always easy to discover, much less remediate when much of the software being deployed is based on third-party open-source code created by a contributor that isn’t always obligated to fix something until they might be good and ready.
