Posted by: Praveen Joshi
August 16, 2022
It is the implementation of the cyber security practices of Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing on mobile applications. The purpose is to find vulnerabilities present in the application that might help the threat actors to succeed in their malicious intents. In other words, Mobile Application VAPT is the measure to make the security posture of the said applications strong and more resilient against malicious activities that are prevailing online nowadays.
of attacks on mobile applications involve unauthorized access to user data.
of attacks are initiated through unauthorized application access.
of all mobile application attacks are MITM (man in the middle) attacks.
of companies never test their mobile application codes for vulnerabilities.
In today’s world with continuously evolving technology, mobile applications have become an essential part of our daily lives. Not only individuals, but companies also use these applications to make their communications and data transition smooth and easy. However, the same evolution in technology is enabling threat actors to carry out malicious activities like hacks and data theft. Your mobile applications possibly could be on the radar of these threats.
Both people and organizations have plenty of data stored on their mobile applications. Even a single loophole in the security of your application might give hackers access to this data too. And it is axiomatic how catastrophic its results are. The VAPT services provide security testing for mobile applications that will uncover all the vulnerabilities within the security posture of your application. Predominantly, hackers target mobile applications because there are n number of resources on these applications to exploit.
To counter the threats lured by all these reasons, you need the mobile application VAPT. This will make the security and response of your application to threat vectors much stronger to breach.
There is a set of processes to conduct VAPT whether it is on web applications or mobile applications. VAPT Services follow the proper sequence of steps to test your mobile applications for vulnerabilities and security weaknesses.
The following are the steps involved in the mobile application VAPT:
Before you start the process of VAPT on the mobile application, you need to decide the coverage of the test. This will include the selection of areas of the application you want to test. Depending on the type of application, the test coverage might vary consisting of the appropriate mixture of devices and OS variations. There is a wide range of parameters that will help you cover all the requirements of mobile application testing.
The next step by the VAPT Services in mobile application testing is to decide whether to use the mobile phone or tablet to initiate testing or deploy simulators or emulators to replace them. However, simulators are better in terms of speeding up the test procedure. But they might miss out on the escaped defects without the presence of a real device where the application is run. Hence, it is better to use the actual mobile device for precise test results and higher accuracy in detecting errors.
In the planning phase, there are two necessary steps. The first one is to decide between manual and automated test procedures. Most organizations nowadays prefer a combination of the two. As some areas are quite complex and narrow to be tested automatically, manual testing fills in for the gaps. The second crucial part of the planning phase is to write the test scripts.
This is the moving phase of the VAPT process for mobile applications. The test scripts run on the application. Here the testing team works with the strategy of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).
After the full execution of test scripts on the application, comes the stage where you need to analyze and categorize the vulnerabilities to be fixed. The remediation of the weaknesses found will be based on priority. The most “critical go first” and those not that “critical go after”. Plus, this stage involves thorough documentation of the entire process done by the VAPT services.
