Tag Archive for: finance

Intertrust Releases 2021 Report on Mobile Finance App Security

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SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Intertrust, the pioneer in digital rights management (DRM) technology and leading provider of application security solutions, today released its 2021 State of Mobile Finance App Security Report. The report reveals that 77% of financial apps have at least one serious vulnerability that could lead to a data breach.

This report comes at a time where finance mobile app usage has rapidly accelerated, with the number of user sessions in finance apps increasing by up to 49% over the first half of 2020. Over the same period, cyberattacks against financial institutions rose by 118%, according to VMware.

The study’s overall findings suggest that while the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the world’s shift to digital financial channels and innovative technologies like mobile contactless payments, mobile financial application security is not keeping up.

Cryptographic issues pose one of the most pervasive and serious threats, with 88% of analyzed apps failing one or more cryptographic tests. This means the encryption used in these financial apps can be easily broken by cybercriminals, potentially exposing confidential payment and customer data and putting the application code at risk for analysis and tampering.

Other main findings include:

  • One or more security flaws were found in every app tested
  • 84% of Android apps and 70% of iOS apps have at least one critical or high severity vulnerability
  • 81% of finance apps leak data
  • 49% of payment apps are vulnerable to encryption key extraction
  • Banking apps contain more vulnerabilities than any other type of finance app
  • Nearly three-quarters of high severity threats could have been mitigated using application protection technologies such as code obfuscation, tampering detection, and white-box cryptography

The report analyzed over 150 mobile finance applications split evenly between iOS and Android and delivers insights from four major financial sectors: payments, banking, investment/trading, and lending. The apps investigated originated in the U.S., UK, EU, Southeast Asia, and India. They were analyzed using an array of static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application…

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Is Your Small Business Taking Mobile Security Seriously?

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Norton Security Review | Test vs Malware

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The Next World War – Will Cyber Or Finance Dominate?

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With 100,000 Russian troops massing on the borders of Ukraine and enjoying a buildup of supporting airpower and logistics, I was happy to receive Admiral James Stavridis and Elliot Ackermann’s cheerily entitled book ‘2034 – a Novel of the Next World War’ through the letterbox.

The book outlines how a potential naval focused war between China and the US might play out. It is a fun read though also an unvarnished appeal for the USA to spend more on cyber capabilities, and at times ascribes a tactical naivety to the US navy that is implausible.

New World Order

While there is a cottage industry of writers opining on the ‘next’ war in the South China Sea, Stavridis is well qualified as a warrior and scholar. From my own non-military perch, the book emphasized at least four things about the ‘new world order’ that Xi Jinping references at last week’s Boao Forum.  

The first of these is that clusters of books that warn against coming wars, may eventually be worth paying attention to. The outstanding example here is Erskine Childers’ ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ which intricately unveiled the contours of how Britain was vulnerable to a surprise attack by the German navy (a trajectory later enacted by Maldwin Drummond in Rune VII).

Riddle of the Sands

A related thought is that history repeats itself, which is why the argument of Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ is a seductive one. In addition, reading Margaret McMillan’s ‘1914’ I was struck by the inexorable buildup of navies (principally Germany and Britain) in the early part of the 20th century (that Norman Angell also flagged in ‘The Great Illusion’) and the parallels between this phase of history and the growth of the Chinese navy, which on number of ships alone is bigger than the American one.

The third…

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