BLOG

Protecting Your Mobile Apps with F5

Peter Zavlaris Thumbnail
Peter Zavlaris
Published August 08, 2023

As customers and regulators have become more aware of the volume and variety of mobile app security risks, the pressure to provide protection against data breaches, bad bots, mobile app abuse, and leaked data from mobile apps has ramped up considerably.

Bad actors can manipulate your mobile apps by downloading them and repackaging them with malware—61% of the 400 most-used Android finance apps are vulnerable to repackaging attacks.1 They can also exploit in-app vulnerabilities that impact standard mobile environments in addition to jailbroken/rooted phones. There were 58 zero-day exploits uncovered for Android in 2021, up 100% from 2020.2 Also, bad actors use mobile app emulators, creating mobile bad bot armies that are used to attack your internet infrastructure directly. A single emulator can imitate 8K devices.3

In addition to security risks, you must also navigate rigorous privacy (CCPA, GDPR), payments (PCI-DSS, EMVCo SBMP, PSD2), and health (HIPAA) compliance standards should your mobile app portfolio provide services in those areas. Meeting security and compliance requirements presents high degrees of complexity with deploying, scaling, and managing mobile app security solutions.

The Mobile App Security Suite from F5 blends mobile app shielding with bot defense to ensure that you can lower mobile app security risk and guard against compliance violations, financial loss, data leakage, fraud, customer churn, and reputational harm. You get a mobile app security solution, which proactively hardens your mobile apps, as well as prevents tampering (RASP), data exfiltration, and API abuse with proactive protection from malware, bad bots, unauthorized access, and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Unlike mobile app shield solutions, the Mobile App Security Suite blends bot defense with app shielding to protect your mobile apps at runtime and at rest, ensuring your mobile apps are tamper-resistant and constantly monitored so you can meet mobile compliance requirements and protect your backend infrastructure from bots. In addition, mobile app security is designed to be deployed easily, with low-code technology that accelerates time-to-value and reduces engineering effort. You can deploy and/or scale across your mobile app portfolio 3x faster than with manual deployments.

With the Mobile App Security Suite, you can avoid the costs of data breaches and compliance fines. In addition, you can prevent bad bots from circumventing your web security defenses to attack your backend infrastructure and APIs. With the ability to deploy and scale seamlessly, you are ensured fast time-to-value and maximized ROI.

Learn more about how the Mobile App Security Suite from F5 Distributed Cloud Services can fit with your specific needs.


Sources:

1 Promon App Threat Report: Q4 2022

2 Zimperium, Top 10 Android banking trojans target apps with 1 billion downloads, June 2022

3 Ars Technica, “Evil mobile emulator farms” used to steal millions from US and EU banks, December 2020