Protect Your Business with Enterprise Mobile Security in 2024

If you are not taking enterprise mobile security seriously, look at these stats:

According to the State of Enterprise Mobile Security 2022 Report, 75% of the analyzed phishing sites targeted mobile devices. The same report stated that 30% of the total zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in 2021 targeted mobile devices.

Security Week states that mobile phishing attacks have increased at a consistent 85% rate since 2011. What’s more, they surged by 37% in 2020’s first quarter.  

Did you notice how hackers are increasingly targeting mobile devices? Therefore, it’s time to buckle up and enhance your enterprise security measures to protect your business from such threats.

This blog discusses six measures to improve your enterprise mobile security or EMS. So, read in full.

Top 6 tips to improve EMS or security of your mobile application

1. Secure mobile apps against reverse engineering and hacking

Reverse engineering is a process wherein individuals (usually hackers or competitors) gain access to the source code and other resources of an application (iOS/Android) for:

1. Bypassing authentication to access premium features of your app.
2. Learning how your app logically works.
3. Stealing unique features of your apps.

Here’s how you can secure mobile apps against reverse engineering & hacking:

• Use the right programming language: C/C++ for Android and Swift for iOS.
• Code obfuscation: Code obfuscation means deliberately making the code complex and hard for humans to understand. This protects the code from hackers to a certain extent.
• Secure APIs: Always use secure APIs to communicate between the server and the app.
• Encrypt databases: Use encryption algorithms such as AES-256 to secure databases for better security. 
• Never hardcode API keys: Always access API keys dynamically to prevent hackers from stealing them.

2. Integrate security throughout the app dev lifecycle

An enterprise application contains crucial information about all departments, from sales and marketing to accounts and HR. Losing this information could be disastrous for your enterprise.

However, if you integrate security throughout the app dev lifecycle, you can reduce the risk to a minimum. It’s because integrating security in the software development lifecycle ensures the end result:

• Has no or minimal flaws.
• Has a clean code.
• It poses no threat to your enterprise's data.

Sounds good? Here’s how you can integrate security throughout the app dev lifecycle:

i) Incorporate security frameworks

When you reach the requirement/planning stage, you must incorporate security frameworks per industry standards into your SDLC. This will help you follow security best practices regardless of the development methodology.

ii) Create or subscribe to a risk management process

After incorporating security frameworks, you must include a reliable risk management and mitigation model. The role of this framework/model is to detect, assess, and deal with the risks to your application.

3. Vigorous testing of the software 

While all developers know the importance of testing, they usually ignore it because of time constraints and other issues. However, it would help if you didn’t do that. After all, testing helps you detect flaws in your code or the software.

So, ensure to include vigorous testing (alpha, beta, and pen testing) in your software development lifecycle at all possible stages. Also, try to execute two or more sessions of complete application testing to boost the state of enterprise mobile security even further.

4. Make use of stronger authentication

One of the most fundamental aspects of improving the security of your mobile application is user authentication/authorization. After all, that’s what decides whether the user will get access to the application or not.

To strengthen your authentication process, you can integrate 2FA or two-factor authentication in your mobile enterprise app. In 2FA, a user password is not enough; the user must enter a password (something a user knows about) and a token (something a user has) for added security.

If you take the state of enterprise mobile security to another level, you can also prompt the user to set answers to common questions like “When was he born or What was his favorite sport growing up.” And when the user tries to log in, on top of 2FA, you can ask the user to answer these questions.

5. Encrypt all the data stored on the device

While storing data on the device isn’t recommended, some information still needs to be stored. And this information, even if it gets deleted, can be recovered. Now, that’s both good and bad news. Good, because you can get your data back; bad, because hackers can get that data back, too.

Therefore, make sure to encrypt whatever data you store on the device. Also, don’t use just any encryption technique; use a 256-bit advanced encryption algorithm to store data in the form of a secure database. 

6) Use app wrapping

App wrapping is another effective way of improving enterprise mobile security. 

App wrapping encapsulates or adds an extra layer of security around a particular enterprise application. 

IT admins can wrap any application on your employees’ mobile devices using APIs from EMM or SDKs.

With the help of app wrapping, IT admins can enforce security policies on a particular app. For instance, they can decide:

• What data can the user access through the app?
• Whether or not the user can modify or delete any data.
• What network the user can access & more.

This way, whatever happens happens under the supervision of IT admins. If they notice something suspicious, they can take action instantly.

Wrapping up

Now that you have the top 6 tips to improve enterprise mobile security, start implementing them right now. However, always draw a strategic plan before implementing it to ensure the best results.

Also, if you need assistance with API security testing, dynamic security testing, static security testing, or advanced penetration testing, book an appointment with Appknox. 

Appknox is the industry leader in vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. We help enterprises and individual developers test their applications within minutes to ensure complete mobile security testing.