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Mobile apps to fail security tests and expose businesses to cyber-attacks

Wednesday 24 September 2014 08:02 CET | News

The majority of mobile applications (75%) will fail basic security tests over the next 15 months, leaving businesses vulnerable to cyber-attacks, according to a recent report.

A research conducted by Gartner reveals that enterprises are increasingly embracing BYOD, with more than 90% of enterprises using third-party commercial applications, and mobile computing is becoming an integral part of the way companies do business. However, the applications that employees download and which can access enterprise assets or perform business functions, do not come with security assurances.

Gartner also predicted that, as application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST), which have evolved over the last six to eight years, continue to mature, vendors will tweak them to address mobile applications.

The study noted that a new kind of test, called behavioral analysis, is coming to bear for mobile applications. In that type of testing, a running application is monitored to detect malicious and/or risky behavior exhibited by an application in the background.

By 2017, Gartner expects the focus of endpoint breaches to shift to tablets and smartphones, noting that there are already 3 attacks to mobile devices for every attack to a desktop. The majority of the breaches will occur as a result of misconfiguring mobile applications, such as the misuse of personal cloud service through applications on a smartphone, rather than the outcome of technical attacks on mobile devices.


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Keywords: mobile apps, security tests, cyber-attacks, BYOD, digital identity, online security
Categories: Fraud & Financial Crime
Companies:
Countries: World
This article is part of category

Fraud & Financial Crime