The mobile apps you use to protect yourself from the rising tide of data breaches, malware, and AI-powered bot attacks may soon offer better internet security.
Security company Appdome Mobile released a technology update to its mobile security tools on January 23. New digital security products will help protect against more than 100 attackers who are flooding the digital space.
More than any other security solution, MobileBot Defence offers comprehensive protection against the growing threat of the mobile channel. Key features include strong protection against phishing, weapons, and malicious applications.
This protection is important when fraudulent apps posing as legitimate apps flood app stores to steal user data.
In addition, the product provides a strong barrier against bot and identity attacks, which have become popular methods for cybercriminals to bypass standard security measures. These attacks can lead to large-scale data breaches, resulting in significant financial and reputational losses.
It can also prevent DDoS attacks that could harm an organisation’s online services and account takeovers that could lead to unauthorised access to user accounts. Both have a significant impact on a business and its customers.
New features added to MobileBot Defence make it fully portable across any firewall (WAF) application. According to Appdome, these improvements can save mobile brands millions of dollars, extend the life of existing WAF infrastructure, and reduce the cost of deploying anti-bot protection in the mobile channel.
“Most mobile brands have separate WAF environments or are looking to replace, add, or upgrade some portion of their WAF environment,” said Tom Tovar, CEO and co-founder of Appdome.
“By combining no-SDK code, no SDK, and a server-side value proposition with full bot protection capabilities, brands now have the operative flexibility to extend bot protection to the mobile channel without needing an upgrade.” WAF environment.”
Mobile Apps in Bot Attack Crosshairs
Mobile apps are typically more vulnerable to attack than web apps, and the threats are more varied and complex. They also face the risk of an increasing number of malicious bot attacks on mobile apps, a significant shift in cybersecurity.
“There are thousands of unique attackers that leverage the mobile channel, targeting devices, the mobile app, and the web—often all simultaneously,” he told TechNewsWorld.
These include device/OS threats such as rooting/jailbreaking, rootkits/rooting/jailbreaking and kernel-based attacks; emulators/simulators/virtualisation tools; and bypassing. Add application threats such as clickers, code injection, overlay attacks, fake applications/clones, network threats such as MitM attacks, SSL pinning bypass, malicious proxies, replay attacks, and more. – Bavosa said.
The growing number of bot attacks on mobile apps, often powered by artificial intelligence, is a critical issue. “They pose a grave threat to the security and functionality of mobile applications, users, and brands,” he warned.
The role of modern AI and the effectiveness of these attacks include their ability to mimic human behaviour and bypass traditional security measures. AI-powered bots can also adapt their strategies based on evolving defence mechanisms, making them difficult to detect and combat,” said Bavosa.
AI-Enhanced Apps and Security Imperatives
In today’s uncertain economic climate, retailers increasingly use mobile apps to drive business growth and maximise returns on investment. But to be successful, retailers must do more than develop their mobile apps for their key audiences, says Lawrence Snapp, program manager at artificial intelligence company Bryj.
“Brands must meet the high expectations of users from mobile applications. This includes reimagining the digital retail experience using artificial intelligence to create targeted products and more relevant customer advertising. Based on their purchasing history and the use of AI-powered tools, it is important to improve performance, application availability, and retail customer acquisition efforts,” he told TechNewsWorld.
Snapp added: “As the most effective and least expensive media channel, retailers will increasingly rely on native mobile apps for continued business success in 2024 and beyond.”
Mobile security platform developer Zimperium reported in its Global Mobile Threats 2023 report that the total number of mobile malware samples increased by 51%. This growth is primarily due to mobile devices are a significant point of personal and professional use, making them a prime target for attackers.
“Banking Trojans, in particular, provide a significant ROI for attackers, and their prevalence has increased dramatically as attackers use new techniques to bypass traditional detection methods. As mobile devices remain central to people’s lives in the next year, we expect to see this trend as the number of attacks and malware continues to grow exponentially.
Bringing authentication technology to mobile devices can provide an additional security alternative to traditional mobile applications. One of the reasons the shift to mobile IDs is happening rapidly is that they are much harder to counterfeit than physical IDs, which can be counterfeited, stolen, or used for various sophisticated purposes. And sophisticated methods. Suggested by Andrey Stanovnov, founder and technical director of IDScan.
“As individuals and businesses adopt mobile identification and verification methods, we may see a rise in the number of physical ID documents that hope to replace digital checks. This is why businesses must ensure they have physical and digital verification systems. Fight against illegal certificates, in whatever form they may be.”
Better Bot Defense
Unlike other anti-bot protection products, users can use the Appdome Defence platform with any cloud, hosted, or on-premises web application. It also requires no software development kit (SDK), no mobile code changes, and no server changes, and it provides full support for all mobile languages and platforms.
Appdome also introduced the ability to monitor bot attacks in real time with ThreatScope Mobile XDR.
The new bot-detection and analysis service enables mobile brands to measure, track, investigate, report, and respond to threats and attacks targeting WAF infrastructure. It provides SOC-level visibility into mobile bot attacks and threats by fully decomposing attacks on specific applications, devices, operating systems, releases, and more without a dedicated analytics package, SDK, or device agent.
“Promotion and visibility provide significant financial benefits for brands that have a significant or growing mobile app footprint,” Chris Rockle, chief product officer at Appdome, told TechNewsWorld.
“Whereas other anti-bot products force developers to sacrifice performance by using SDKs that only work with WAF vendor SDKs,” he added.
He noted that Appdome’s bot protection allows brands to maintain existing WAF investments, unify visibility and response to bot activity across WAFs, and separate bot protection and WAF infrastructure.
Rate Limiting Protection
Appdome brings a unique dimension to its security platform. MobileBot Defence includes a new application restriction feature that stops mobile DDoS attacks at the source. Mobile brands can define Appdome speed limits by setting thresholds for the number of attempts to reach the end within specific periods.
“One of the major challenges facing mobile apps and their security is that mobile teams and processes are being developed light years ahead of traditional security practices, especially given the widespread use of automation,” Bavosa said.
“If you look at the tools used by development teams in a typical CI/CD pipeline, everything is automated, and all the tools work together,” he noted.
From a security perspective, the tools, products, and services legacy security companies offer, such as SDKs, are manual and require coding work and constant code updates/changes, Bavosa explained. This places extreme demands on organisations with the most resources – mobile development and development.
Appdome has brought to market the industry’s first and only mobile cybersecurity tool that allows our customers to unify their mobile security requirements into a single platform within the CI/CD pipeline that the organisation already uses. Create and release mobile applications,” he said.
Multi-Vendor Compatibility
According to Bavosa, other security solutions cannot protect against multi-vendor mobile bots in the mobile channel. WAF providers provide SDKs that must be manually integrated into the mobile app for the solution to work on mobile devices.
An application can have one Web Application Firewall SDK. Let’s say you have a separate WAF environment, as most large companies do. In this case, you need to implement two or more SDKs. These solutions will never work together, as multiple SDKs will conflict and cause the mobile app to crash.
On the other hand, Appdome MobileBot Defence works with WAFs from different vendors. Bavosa concludes that this adaptation provides significant financial and operational benefits for mobile brands.