Financial applications meant for banking services are said to be vulnerable to cyber attacks. And this was revealed in a new study commissioned by cybersecurity firm Arxan and produced by Aite Group.
Almost 97% of apps tried and tested in the past six weeks did not show any defense to protect their source codes which are devastating says Mobile Marketer which has been authorized to share the study results to the public.
What’s more interesting and also concerning is that 80% of financial institutional apps stored data in an insecure way- either outside sandbox or in the device’s local file system, an external storage or copied to the clipboard. The study also found that 80% of apps have weak encryption algorithms or implemented incorrect strong ciphers- making the data fall prey to hackers.
Aite Group said that its survey included all those apps which were running on Google Play Store that covers retail banking, credit cards, mobile payments, cryptocurrency, health savings accounts, retail brokerage and health, and auto insurance.
The other susceptibilities found in the code across the sectors include hard-coded SQL statements and hard-coded private certificates that a threat actor could easily switch over.
Only Health savings accounts and health insurer mobile payment apps were found to be secure enough to deal with the current threats prevailing the cyber landscape.
In another survey conducted by Verizon, it was revealed that one in three firms experienced data breaches related to a mobile device in the past 6 months.
However, financial experts say that the security lapses in mobile apps will not hinder the rapid growth of the mobile payments market, which is predicted to expand to about 33% a year to $457.4 billion till 2026.
