Protect Your Apps from OWASP Mobile Top 10 Risks

A smartphone is the most powerful device of present era as it can help the user in many ways. One can enjoy communication from this device in written as well as oral forms. One can carry out banking and mailing with the help of this handy device using the internet. As it is most useful one, the user also needs to care for its internal and external security. It must be saved from various malwares and programs that can damage the same. Before using the device one must know the risks he may be carrying with it.

It is very important to protect your apps from the OWASP mobile top 10 risks. These may change from time to time as the group of developers from around the world keep working on such things and update the latest list that needs maximum attention. As technology is moving at a fast pace, even attackers are improving a lot and the nature of attacks have become very complex. In this regard, you need good understanding about the risks that come with improper coding in your apps. You can take professional help to fix such vulnerabilities in your apps so that you can provide seamless service to your customers.

The community of developers from around the world constantly work on such threats and even provide methods to counter them in the real world. The detailed documentation to handle such threats are published by the community and they also suggest suitable tools to make the apps secure and efficient. You can make use of such tools yourself or choose professional help to make your apps secure in the long run. These threats can affect your apps in many ways. Let us understand the various risks associated with them in a detailed manner.

Whatsapp Zero Day Vulnerability

You will be surprised to know that even very big apps that are used by millions of people around the world also have vulnerabilities. Attackers can easily take advantage of such loopholes and install malicious software to collect valuable user data. This was recently done with Whatsapp when attackers used the vulnerability to install spyware on user’s phones. The attackers created a buffer overflow into the system while making calls and this would install the spyware on the phone. The most interesting part of this attack was that the trick worked even when the call was not answered at the other end.

However, the Whatsapp team was quick to realize this vulnerability and they fixed it to avoid further damage to their business. This is one of the threats discussed in OWASP and it comes with improving client code quality. You have to check the implementation problems associated with the code and fix them before they can damage your system. The most common flaws include buffer overflow and format string vulnerability. The code that has a problem has to be fixed using proper solutions and this will rectify the issue in future.

Pokemon GO Code tampering

Pokemon GO is a popular game that has millions of fans around the world. Some fans however discovered some vulnerabilities and exploited many aspects of the game. They even went on to publish the vulnerabilities on the Internet and this had an adverse impact on the reputation of the company as the game could be hacked easily. The fans used the concept of code tampering and provided wrong geolocation while playing the game to find rare pokemon. They even displayed the location of all pokemon on a map and this spoiled the entire fun in the game.

The code can be tampered with using reverse engineering methods and companies have to be careful about this method. The code tampering can usually be done through binary patching or by local resource modification method. Apart from that, even dynamic memory modification methods can be used to tamper the code of many such games. If you are developing a game, make sure that attackers cannot use such methods to tamper the code and use the vulnerability to their advantage in future.

Insecure authentication problem

When your app is not able to identify the user or when the identity of the user is not maintained properly, it can lead to authentication issues. This can become a huge vulnerability as attackers wait for such flaws to take over the system. When this leads to bad session management, attackers will be given enough opportunity to try multiple passwords into the user’s accounts. In this way, they can easily manage to crack most weak passwords with multiple attempts. If they keep on trying some combinations of passwords, one or the other will click and they will gain access into the user’s account.

In order to avoid such problems, you need to manage sessions properly and immediately trigger an alert when some suspicious login attempts are made to any account. This can help you to identify hacking attacks in the initial stages and you will be able to prevent them in the long run.

These are some of the examples of OWASP mobile top 10 risks and you can get a detailed documentation of the risks by connecting with the developers’ community. It can be a difficult task to fix all the problems by yourself if you do not have sufficient experience in this domain. In that situation, you can easily rely on professional service providers to assess the risk with your apps. They will try to hack your apps in as many ways as possible and identify the vulnerabilities associated with your code.

Once this is done, it becomes easy to fix them and they will be able to offer the best solutions to avoid such loopholes in your code. You can even use real time monitoring services to identify the threats and attacks in real time and avoid various attacks. The service providers will be able to provide the best mobile app security solutions after analyzing the performance of the app. In this way, you can get complete security services without worrying about the performance of the app.

A professional blogger and write to specializes in buliding online communities.Rahul Yadav on Helping people to understand how to better driver traffic.