Security Holes in Mobile Apps—and the App Stores that Provide Them
With the rise in popularity of BYOD (bring your own device) to work across the US, many companies are rushing to educate employees about the added importance of avoiding insecure Internet connections and the immediate actions to take if a personal phone or tablet goes missing.
One area of concern that’s seemingly being ignored—perhaps because no one has an answer for it—is the immense popularity of third party apps and the rampant invasions of privacy that many of them commit.
No matter how closely an employee follows his company’s security policies, keeping corporate data one-hundred percent secure on a mobile device is seemingly impossible for now especially when companies like Facebook and ESPN are a couple of the biggest culprits.
Why do third party apps contain the security flaws they do? Because you allow them to collect data like your current location, your calendar, even your contacts list when you agree to the terms and conditions as you add the apps to your device.
InfoWorld recently compiled a list of nine wildly successful mobile apps that invade users’ privacy and thereby increase the odds of data being stolen or corrupted. These nine apps are a mere drop in the bucket of the total number of mobile apps engaged in this privacy sharing practice. Between June and July 2012, one hundred and seventy-five thousand “malicious and high-risk” apps were found available for Android devices alone.
Trend Micro, an antivirus provider for both Internet and cloud computing, found those numbers last year and recently partnered with BlackBerry to increase the security of BB10 devices. Trend Micro will look for major security flaws inside apps being submitted to BlackBerry World, in hopes of keeping the flaws from ever having a chance to infect devices and put users, or companies, at risk.
Even if you’ve never personally downloaded a third party app, many devices come preloaded with them, and just because they were on the device when you purchased it hardly means that the apps are “safe.” To better protect mobile devices, there are numerous simple steps that can be taken, all of which are great ideas whether your device is for work, play, or both.
Until app stores start bragging about the security of their apps—instead of the sheer number of available apps—we can all do more to protect the data on our phones and tablets, no matter who owns them.
