Now here is a matter of security concerns for Developers and Users. According to Arxan Technologies – A Software Security firm’s Second Annual State of Security in the App Economy Report, 78 percent of the top 100 paid Google Play and Apple Store apps – platforms Android and Apple devices respectively for have been hacked. This number goes to 56 percent for these apps which were compromised this year.
If this sounds to be a concern, you should revisit the past last year, as this year’s numbers represent a 36 percent decrease from the last year’s numbers in the report by Arxan Technologies. These security issues are not limited to the paid apps only, as hackers target free apps as well. The free app markets on both platforms offer apps that have a high hacked app rate, which is 73 percent and 53 percent on Android and iOS respectively, whereas 80 percent Android apps and 40 percent iOS apps have been found compromised, states Arxan Technologies.
According to Arxan, Cracked Mobile Apps (piracy) are the primary reason for posing the danger to the users and developers, taking into consideration the boom in use of smartphones and tablets by folk at home and work.
Kevin Morgan, the Chief Technology Officer at Arxan Technologies gave a statement saying that IP theft costs Software Stakeholder millions of dollars every year, and Unprotected Apps are easily exposed to Tampering – by means of Malware or Decompiling and Reverse Engineering. This enables hackers to analyze the coding of the apps and helps them target core security or business logic that is responsible for safeguarding access to corporate data, Morgan added.
Mobile apps that deal with your financial data have been found to be especially at risk as users feed their bank account number, passwords and other crucial data. According to Arxan’s app review, 53 percent of the Financial Apps on Android, and 23 percent on iOS were cracked.
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Pirated versions of famous software are easily available on various websites across the world. These websites are primarily torrent sites, App distribution sites and / or hacker/cracker sites, said Kevin Morgan. He added, “During our research we discovered that some of the hacked versions have been downloaded over half a million times which gives a sense of the magnitude of the problem especially as we embark upon a season of high consumer activity that will involve payment transactions, and consumption of products and services via the mobile.”
Not only Android and iOS have faced such issues, but BlackBerry also has suffered the wraith of this issue, as earlier this year BlackBerry was forced to suspend the official release of its famous Messenger – BBM to iPhone and Android mobile devices for almost a month, as an unreleased version of the BBM for Android was released online unofficially, which resulted in an unexpectedly high magnitude of traffic inflow per active user, as cited by BlackBerry. As a result of which, BlackBerry had to hold the official release of the BBM for over a month to completely block the unreleased version, and worked on their system to handle such kind of a future e-tragedy.
Still, the developers of the iOS, Android and BlackBerry leave no stone unturned to make their platforms safe and secured for the user and developers.
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