The smartphone app ecosystems today are extraordinarily vast. The Google Play store has over 3.5 million apps available, while the Apple App store has over 1.6 million apps. The question becomes, with so many different applications available on these platforms, how can you be so sure that the apps you are downloading to your mobile device are secure? Let’s take a look at mobile app store security and why it’s become more than just a security issue.
Both Google and Apple take care in order to protect their users from malware. It’s not a perfect system, but generally, these app stores want you to be able to trust the content available on them. This is kind of ominous since a corrupt app could presumably steal data, deploy malware, and other negative things.
Google’s Play Store has a lot of protections in place to limit the number of insecure apps that make it on the platform, but they also have the highest track record of problematic software available for the user to download. The Apple app store has fewer examples of this type of problem being reported, but it still happens. The same can be said of Amazon’s. Basically, if you are going to download apps for your mobile device, most of them will be legitimate.
That’s not to say that you should trust every download.
The world’s massive amount of mobile device users depend on their app ecosystems to acquire the secure software they use to make their mobile devices run. The official app stores, the Google Play store for Android-fueled phones; and Apple store for iOS-fueled devices, have procedures in place that check every new app for malicious behavior. Unfortunately, some malignant apps do get through, even though it is a minuscule percentage, these apps can still deploy malware and siphon data and put any network that phone comes into contact with into peril.
If you are one of the people that is unfortunate enough to download a malicious app from a reputable app store, here are three problems you can run into:
There are a few definitive steps you can take to ensure that you don’t deal with malicious apps. They include:
If you would like to learn more about how to navigate mobile productivity and security for your business, call one of our knowledgeable consultants at (603) 499-4400 today.
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