You wouldn’t even consider walking out of the house with everything you hold dear crammed into your pockets. So things like credit cards, social security number, passwords, health records, personal details, you like to think they are safe and sound at your home or somewhere even safer. But they are actually not. Each time you carry your smartphone with you, you are basically carrying most of your personal life in the pocket of your jacket.
Just think about what someone can do if they get a hold of your email account details. Simply combining your emails and a phone number, you can get most of this information within an hour.
Feeling concerned yet?
One of the ways to protect people from these malicious cyber attacks is using secure apps and strictly upholding the safety methods that protect you from becoming the next victim. Not storing your credit cards info and passwords on a single device is no longer good enough. These days you need to pay attention to the apps on your phone as well. For example, if a mobile app developer neglects the safety and security principles, any app on your phone can be used as a back door to your personal life. And just to clarify what principles should be upheld when it comes to secure mobile app development, let’s just list a few of them: authentication, API security, code protection, backend network protection, encryption, data leakage, sensitive data storage, etc.
Where is this applicable?
Developers can only make a prediction regarding the user behaviour and they cannot know for sure if the users are actually familiar with these security issues. The way to combat possible problems is to add additional layers of security that protect end users from breaches and any wrongful actions. This is especially true for apps that handle any sort of finances, banking and other tasks, personal data storing and transfer tasks, etc.
Let’s take an online casino app as an example and consider why this app requires additional layers of security. In case that someone breaches your account, they will have direct access to your cashier which is linked to your bank that you used to deposit and withdraw funds. The account can be breached by getting a hold of your username and password. Those can be obtained by gaining access to the email connected to your online casino account. The email access can be gained using your social network, for which access can be obtained using a simple game or a quiz you play on there. Do you see what we did there?
Working backwards, we showed you how playing a simple game on Facebook, for example, What type of icecream are you, that asks the access to your account which most of the people agree to in 90% of the cases, can lead to a huge financial loss. A simple, seemingly benign click of a mouse can lead to dire consequences and most of the people don’t know about it.
And all of this can be avoided by implementing a simple two-step verification layer of security on the mobile casino app.
What is the solution?
The developers, whether they like it or not, have a responsibility to protect end users from these types of attacks. This is why app developers have to pay attention to the secure mobile app development these days and cover all the possible breaching angles. We will cover all security principles in a series of articles, dedicating an article for each and showcase how all of them should be a considered and included into the process of building a secure mobile app.
