When Google and Apple remove malicious or leaky applications from their stores, people who have them on their smartphone are not notified of their dangerous behaviors. Therefore, millions of users keep them on their devices, exposing all the data they manipulate to identified threats.
Mobile services are increasingly being used for daily activities, for both personal and professional purposes, and being accessed from devices that cannot always be trusted. These usages imply billions of corporate data constantly transiting between information systems, applications and endpoints, widening existing perimeters.
Updated on June 7th: Following the announcement of these discoveries, the "Peel Smart Remote" mobile application was removed from Google Play.
The Peel Smart Remote app is a widely used Google Play application (100M+ installs) that has often made the news because of its highly intrusive behaviors, such as full screen overlays and untimely advertising, causing poor user experience.
Last week, the Pradeo Security engine alerted its users about severe security issues discovered in the app’s 10.7.3.3 version. It has been found that the application collects and leaks users’ pictures to a server that does not belong to the app publisher. Last Friday, the application was updated on the Google Play store (now version 10.7.4.2), the leaky behavior has been removed from the code but yet no communication was made by the company on this matter. Because applications’ update is not automatic on all Android devices, millions of users running the former version of the app are still currently exposed.
The Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) model has known a steady growth in its popularity, taking further the management capacities of the Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) by including not only the company’s mobile devices but also the laptops and desktops devices within the same solution. The UEM solution allows for increased efficiency, more cost-effectiveness and a better mobile security within an organization, this last point being further improvable through the adjunction of a mobile security solution such as a Mobile Threat Defense (MTD) solution.
With the drastically increasing frequency of hacking attempts on mobile applications, on both iOS and Android, and the often devastating consequences they unleash, it is more crucial than ever to use mobile application security solutions. Hardening and shielding refer to a set of technologies designed to protect applications against piracy, exploits, breaches, tampering, as well as reverse-engineering and invasive monitoring, therefore securing intellectual property and ensuring compliance with the current data privacy regulations.