The good news is, they can be protected

We’ve all heard the worst of it: “WhatsApp hacked!” “Airline hacked!” “Bank fined!” Mobile app hacks are becoming increasingly common — it takes a hacker less than 5 minutes to break open a mobile app and get access to your source code, which can be used to launch attacks on your server infrastructure and on your ERP and databases, steal any intellectual property in the app itself, and also spread malware through fake apps pretending to be yours.

The good news is that your apps can be protected, even without dedicated security engineers in your team. Using the same technology as used by the world’s leading technology, banking, retail, and media companies, for services that go as low as $250 a month, you can equip your apps with formidable security.

The future may be mobile, but so are the threats

Most companies are going “mobile-first” for well-understood reasons. In several countries, a mobile device may be the first or only connection that an end-user has to the Internet. It’s not just consumer apps: the immediacy and pervasiveness of access to corporate information are driving enterprises to expose their operations through internal apps too, all of which make mobile apps a critical threat vector to your organization’s cybersecurity.

Particularly when it takes a hacker just 5 minutes (sometimes even less) to break open a mobile app and get access to the app’s source code. And, this bears repetition: once the hacker has access to your source code, they can use the knowledge of how your app works to attack the company’s servers, launch man-in-the-middle attacks, steal valuable intellectual property — especially critical for app-centric industries such as gaming, retail, and tech innovators —, copy your code to create derivatives of your app and your business, and even launch malware through your brand by pretending to be your app (this even happened to WhatsApp).

Digital security at the palm of your hands

Fortunately, the technology exists that can stop these attacks dead in their tracks by making it so exponentially hard for a hacker to reverse engineer your app that he moves on to a softer target equipped with a less secure system.

These technologies include strong obfuscation and anti-tampering, including the ability to optionally prevent an app from being run on jailbroken/rooted devices. If you have an in-house security team, they can use these technologies to protect your mobile apps, to protect libraries that you might be distributing, and even protect firmware on hardware devices, with a very fine level of control over how the security is targeted at different parts of your app. And if you do not have a security team, now you can use automated tools such as www.ProtectMyApp.com by Verimatrix that do all the heavy lifting for you for as little as $250 per month.

One of the globally leading companies in this space is the San Diego company Verimatrix, which helps keeps apps safe for world-leaders in the retail, banking, entertainment, automotive, and government sectors. In fact, Verimatrix currently protects over 2 billion apps and devices in 113 countries. To learn more, please reach out to Varun at varora@verimatrix.com and also download a whitepaper at www.verimatrix.com/downloads/whitepapers/the-wild-wild-west-of-mobile-security

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