Managing Risk is More Important Now Than Ever

February 20, 2018 3389 Views Gabriel Torok

I just read the Forrester Wave™: Governance, Risk, And Compliance Platforms, Q1 2018.

Forrester reminds us all that “Risk and compliance management is more important than ever, thanks to the increasingly intangible nature of business value and the growing risk of violating customer trust.”

The report evaluated 14 leading GRC (governance, risk, and compliance) vendors: ACL, Enablon, IBM, LogicManager, MetricStream, Nasdaq, NAVEX Global, Riskonnect, RSA, Rsam, SAI Global, SAP, ServiceNow, and Thomson Reuters. What was most interesting to me is that 50% of these leading providers use PreEmptive’s application protection tools as part of their own strategy.

With software applications driving new business models, corporate reputations are increasingly at risk and regulatory fines are skyrocketing. Now is an ideal time to implement a comprehensive risk management strategy.

Tools don’t hack apps, hackers do: Securing Android apps against Frida

Search for lockpicking and you’ll see that there’s no shortage of suppliers ready to serve locksmiths and hobbyists, each community having a perfectly legitimate need. Is there any reason to believe that burglars don’t shop the same sites?

Hackers are developers and they have a long history of enthusiastically embracing and adapting development (and DevOps) innovations to speed their work, extend their reach, and ship software – the only difference is that they’re more likely to use those development tools and platforms on YOUR software rather than on their own. Static code analysis tools, debuggers, and even public bug tracking databases are all go-to hacker resources.

Can you tell the difference? Exception or the norm?

Of course, everyone is “for security” in principle. The hard question that each organization has to answer for themselves is “how much is enough?” Over-engineering is (by definition) excessive, and over-engineering application security can, in fact, be devastating as overly-complex algorithms, architectures and processes can compromise user experience, degrade performance and slow development velocity. On the other hand, punishment is swift for organizations that cut corners and do not effectively secure their applications, their data and, most importantly their users and business stakeholders. Finding and maintaining that balance can be time consuming and, because you can never be sure you’ve gotten it exactly right, it can also be a thankless job.

JavaScript is everywhere. It’s currently the world’s most popular programming language; as noted by GitHub, JavaScript has the highest number of contributors and repositories, handily outpacing other alternatives such as Python, PHP and Ruby.

The problem with all this popularity? Massive amounts of great open-source code create opportunities for both in-house development teams and malicious actors. The sheer volume of JavaScript-based services means it’s not enough just design apps with security in mind — businesses must actively mitigate emerging threats by obfuscating critical code to frustrate hacker efforts.

Not sure where to start? Here’s what you need to know about the brewing storm of JavaScript attacks and the simplest ways to reduce your total risk.

Over a year ago we wrote instructions for migrating from ProGuard or DexGuard to DashO. Since that time, Google introduced R8, fundamentally changing the Android build process. Now, we have released PreEmptive Protection DashO for Android & Java, version 10.0 with a new Android Mode that is designed to work with R8. With this release, migrating from ProGuard or DexGuard to DashO is so simple that it almost doesn't need instructions - so we're posting new instructions to make that clear!

Welcome to our new instructions!

Before we begin, let's make sure we're all on the same page. We assume you are currently:

We are proud to announce the public release of PreEmptive Protection DashO for Android & Java v10.0, the next major version of DashO, our powerful Android & Java obfuscation and app protection product.

This release has major changes to our Android support. We've blogged about R8 and Google's build architecture changes before, and this new version of DashO works together with R8 to protect Android apps and libraries. R8 does what it is best at: minification (renaming & removal) and performance (build and runtime), while DashO provides strong protection: Control Flow, String Encryption, and runtime Checks for Tamper, Debug, Root, Emulators, and more. Together you get the best of both worlds.

To accomplish this new integration, we rethought DashO from the ground up, creating a brand new Android Mode with big changes to UI, build-time behaviors, and the way DashO integrates into a Gradle build. It's DashO unlike you've ever known it: even easier to integrate, easier to understand and configure, and easier to keep up to date as your code and Android evolve.

Managing Risk is More Important Now Than Ever

Tools don’t hack apps, hackers do: Securing Android apps against Frida

Trusted Computing: Panacea or Magical Thinking?

Can you tell the difference? Exception or the norm?

No Beans About It: Why You Need JavaScript Obfuscation

Migrating from ProGuard or DexGuard to DashO - Updated!

DashO 10: Android support, rebuilt from the ground up

Latest Blog Posts

Tools don’t hack apps, hackers do: Securing Android apps against Frida

Trusted Computing: Panacea or Magical Thinking?

No Beans About It: Why You Need JavaScript Obfuscation

Migrating from ProGuard or DexGuard to DashO - Updated!

DashO 10: Android support, rebuilt from the ground up

Twitter