A responsible mobile app development practice compels you to reconsider the security of your app as you fabricate it. The use of mobile devices has soared in the past two years. Along with it, the mobile app market has also risen. According to predictions, mobile apps will catalyze more than 935 billion USD by 2023.
Areas with growth prospects continue to attract the attention of risk actors, appearing to exploit susceptibility for financial gain. That is why mobile app security has grown into a critical field of focus across industries – especially if the association has an app that contains priceless intellectual property (IP) or has sensitive data transferring through it.
Enforcing security measures throughout the app development course and continuing to watch the app once it is released into the market is what eventually keeps your mobile app secure and your business safe. Mobile app security testing should have the necessary precedence in any firm that builds and deploys a mobile app. To understand this clearly, let us look at the characteristic security pitfalls mobile apps encounter and the concussion these risks can have on an association.
Mobile apps hacking statistics
Research by App Annie shows that mobile app downloads reached 204 billion in 2019. The worldwide app store consumer spending also boosted to $120 billion.
Although the fashionability of mobile apps is quite evident, hazards related to mobile app security have also risen. Here are several security stats for mobile apps.
- Out of 36 devices, 1 of these experiences a mobile app security threat.
- Rogue apps are liable for 28 of all attacks (in 2018). (A recent report of RSA)
- 71 fraud sales came from mobile apps and browsers (in 2018).
Some instances of breach of security
- Amongst the most recent data infringements, on September 22, 2016, Yahoo substantiated a data breach that unmasked about 500 million credentials that date back to four years. It is considered to be amongst the biggest credential leaks of 2016. The company believes this was a state-supported breach, where an individual hacked the system on behalf of a government. It further prompted users to change their passwords and security problems. To console users, Yahoo stated that delicate financial data like bank accounts and passwords were not compromised as part of the infringement.
- The Panama Papers is an assemblage of 11.5 million records from Mossack Fonseca, primarily leaked to German reporter Bastian Obermayer in 2015. Because of the large data size, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists was approached. Numerous public figures, present and once, had their financial dealings exposed, connecting them to terrorists, drug syndicates, and tax anchorages. Some public figures had their careers affected, and in some cases, the facts led to collective turmoil. This is also suggestive from the cybersecurity point of outlook as it brought to attention the implicit vulnerability and approximate ease of attacking law enterprises, compared to the worth of the data they bear. Fortune magazine wrote a commentary piece called The Panama Papers signals a new kind of Cyber Attack that mentioned hacktivism as the motive, with earnings inequality as the accounting.
Automated mobile app security testing
Automated mobile app security testing is automating static and dynamic assay of mobile apps before deployment. Security testing identifies susceptibility rising from the authorizations of an app, network connectivity, source code, and other aspects of the mobile attack surface. As part of a DevOps drive, enterprises can readily add automated security tests to existing automated functional testing. Mobile app security test automation performs automatic security assessments as part of existing continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous deployment (CD) trials. By including the Sec in DevSecOps, security testing is executed before during the SDLC (when excrescencies are easy and less expensive to fix) and becomes another ceaseless part of the process.
Advantages of automated mobile app security testing
Automation, when done precisely, gives you the chance to parallelize security testing along with your other testing operations. Cloud services enable you to run all of your testing concurrently and at scale. This approach makes security testing just another layer in the testing stack achieved as frequently as unit, integration, compatibility, and performance testing. Using a previously configured CI/CD arrangement, and integrating added tools, allows you to introduce security testing earlier in the SDLC, which reduces the expenditure per bug fix.
Mobile app security testing automation also leaves security reviewers additional time for exploratory testing that identifies bugs at a deeper reach. These bugs might go unnoticed if a reviewer spends their whole day performing high-frequency reiterative testing. By integrating automated security testing into DevSecOps, developers, QA staff, and security squads enable a “set it and forget it” development and deployment model. In addition, numerous security test automation scripts can repurpose scripts that development and QA teams have already created for other forms of testing.
Why security testing will be a priority
In a world where institutions are entrusted with constant innovation to meet their briskly changing demands of the clients, institutions may not risk the fallout of an insecure app.
In 2022, we expect app security testing will presumably turn into a responsibility of the mobile app development squad, done through the support of automated implements. It makes the testing operation cost-efficient and manageable; hence development squads get constant and frequent feedback on the security of a mobile app. An added benefit? An automated testing tool enables developers to administer mobile app testing whenever they want, brooding the team for an effective and successful extrinsic assessment or pen test.
Mobile apps are progressively growing as the most significant way users interact with enterprises. Prioritizing application security scanning in 2022 will enable institutions to take the course to help against data leakage, IP theft, loss of gain, and reputational affliction.
Summing it up
Automated mobile app security testing is becoming indispensable in today’s scenario. Institutions can start using the existing automation frameworks and scripts that have been implemented already as part of their DevOps workflows. A gap that needs to be addressed is the lack of security testing in mobile applications. Although multiple organizations have started using DevOps, less than one-third of mobile apps undergo security testing.