As per our recent article “Why cloning your app is a piece of cake?”, cybercriminals will ultimately always find a way in your app whatever the fencing in place. From basic ad profits to banking trojan or keylogger, hackers have several lucrative and more or less malicious reasons to break into your app and clone it. Besides this, official stores are far from being bullet proof and there are countless news reporting clones being removed after millions of downloads.
It is probably one of the most popular threat of our digital world but still, years after years, phishing continuously tops the list of the most common attack types.
Per Wikipedia: “Phishing is the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by disguising oneself as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.”
Cybersecurity experts are unanimous, mobile apps are hackers’ preferred vector to exfiltrate valuable data from mobile devices. Yet, the flexibility they offer makes them irreplaceable for both work and personal usages. Today, companies cannot afford to forbid public apps usages to their collaborators, even in the most sensitive industries. However, it doesn’t mean they should turn a blind eye to app-related risks.
Needless to emphasize that applications stand at the very heart of mobile usages. Except for very specific business cases, mobile workers require flexibility in their apps usage and have to be free to download, on top of the provided set of corporate applications, any other application they might need. In addition, the democratization of BYOD configurations makes no question of the aforementioned.
One thing is certain: cloning an application is a child’s play for cyber-criminals.
Fake apps (or clones) are Android or iOS mobile applications that mimic to some extend the look and features of an official app while hiding malicious, intrusive or lucrative activities.