Managing Application Vulnerabilities (an early peek into improved controls for your code and data)

October 4, 2016 3900 Views Sebastian Holst

I’m working on an application risk management study/survey focusing on the importance of one vulnerability exploit in particular: debugger hacks against production apps. Our initial data set already includes responses from 100+ developers targeting cloud, mobile and desktop platforms from 15+ countries.

A Clear Material Application Risk for a Majority of Development Teams

58% report ongoing, sustained risk management development investments dedicated to mitigate the following material risks:

Financial theft
Intellectual property theft through application use
Intellectual property theft through application tampering and reverse engineering
Operational disruption
Regulatory and other compliance obligations
Unauthorized access to user and business data

Within the development teams that have taken affirmative action to mitigate these risks, 64% have identified unauthorized use of a debugger in production as a material vulnerability.

If you’re interested in getting the final numbers (and a deeper dive into both the risks and controls to effectively mitigate these risks), I expect to be publishing results in the next 1-2 weeks HERE (there's already a link to a related white paper on this page for download too).

Is your Mobile App GDPR Compliant? Learn how to secure your App

Before I start, I would like to thank PreEmptive for inviting me to write a guest post.

I would like to start my blog with a discussion about the growing cyber threats all over the world. I assume readers are well aware of cyber threats and how they are addressed by people, process, and technology. The continuous planning and advancement of security in the cyber world including but not limited to applications is an interesting read. Here, in my blog, I would like to discuss how companies can support mobile application security for better and safer use of stored data.

On June 11, NIST released Mitigating the Risk of Software Vulnerabilities by Adopting a Secure Software Development Framework. While a solid piece of work in its own right, this document is noteworthy because it stands as one more proof point - in an already long list of proof points, that development processes, the developers themselves, and the organizations they belong to, ALL share some degree of responsibility (liability) for:

Untrusted Environments, Valuable Apps? Put the Protection in the App.

IT environments are evolving. Disappearing are the days of in-house, fixed-endpoint, limited access server stacks — replaced instead by a combination of private and public cloud solutions, mobile applications and IoT devices.

As noted by research firm IDC, public cloud spending now outpaces all other IT infrastructure with a growth rate topping 10 percent year-over-year, while Statista reports that users downloaded more than 178 billion apps in 2017 alone — and are on track to break 250 billion over the next few years.

What does this mean for organizations? That application environments are quickly moving beyond the purview of in-house IT, exposing both apps and network services to steadily growing risk. It creates a paradox: Companies can’t deny the benefits of third-party environments and application partnerships, but also can’t ignore the threat of app and data compromise or reverse-engineering and tampering.

In a recent developer survey, Xamarin.Android developers were 50% less likely to have included rooted device detection or anti-tamper prevention as their Java Android peers were. Yet, both sets of apps are being deployed through the same marketplaces onto the same devices and are governed by the same regulations (PCI, GDPR, HIPAA to name just a few that expect these kinds of controls).

Why are more Xamarin.Android apps going unprotected?

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Sebastian Holst, PreEmptive’s Chief Strategy Officer, to talk about his most recent trip to Capitol Hill where the topic of the day was copyright protection for small businesses – and for development shops in particular.

Managing Application Vulnerabilities (an early peek into improved controls for your code and data)

A Clear Material Application Risk for a Majority of Development Teams

Is your Mobile App GDPR Compliant? Learn how to secure your App

Latest NIST publication reinforces Developer Obligations (and liability)

Put the Protection in the App

Untrusted Environments, Valuable Apps? Put the Protection in the App.

Are Xamarin.Android app users at risk?

Changes are coming for US Copyright – Should Developers Even Care?

Latest Blog Posts

Is your Mobile App GDPR Compliant? Learn how to secure your App

Latest NIST publication reinforces Developer Obligations (and liability)

Put the Protection in the App

Are Xamarin.Android app users at risk?

Changes are coming for US Copyright – Should Developers Even Care?

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