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Why to do Mobile Application Penetration Testing

A mobile application penetration test is a step-by-step evaluation of a mobile application’s security. It is achieved through rigorous simulation of the conditions of an attack according to one or several established methodologies.

Mobile applications have become a primary target for cybercriminals, as mobile phones are increasingly important in the financial, educational, and public services industries worldwide. So, developers are literarily compelled to be very attentive to the level of security of their mobile applications.

To check it, the offensive way of assessing the security of all the components of mobile applications or penetration testing is usually chosen, as it is the most efficient method, as it tests resilience to real-world attacks.

To conduct efficient mobile penetration testing you need to choose a reliable provider of the respective service, possessing proven experience in mobile pentests, and having ethical hackers with respective certifications, as well as positive reviews from the clients. The provider should be covering both Android and iOS mobile application pentesting as these two operating systems account for like 99% of the total market of mobile OS, and most likely your mobile application will be targeting both Google Play and Apple Store.

Benefits of Mobile Application Penetration Testing

Mobile application penetration testing requires a certain investment of efforts and resources, however, it provides multiple benefits and prevents a lot of potential issues for the application owner and the end users.

• Improved application security: mobile application penetration test will help discover vulnerabilities and let the developers eliminate them before they are exploited in security breaches.
• Compliance requirements: more and more industries are creating or hardening further the security requirements for mobile (and other) applications which should be met. Penetration testing reports would usually be an essential component of those requirements.
• Improved confidence: Having a mobile application penetration test report, and respective certificate, you prove to the partners, customers, authorities, etc, that you have taken required security precautions and your product is secure enough to be used.
• Cost savings: the identification and elimination of vulnerabilities to avoid security breaches will save you a lot of money on damage recovery efforts, fines, etc.
• Advanced security awareness for developers: penetration test, especially its remediation stage in coordination with the application security engineers will educate the software developers in the area of secure by-design software development.

Security and Compliance Standards

There exist dozens of industry frameworks, security standards, and compliance standards. They include OWASP MASVS, NIST 800-53, Google Play Data Safety independent security review, and many others. Experienced penetration testing companies usually develop their proprietary mobile penetration testing methodologies, uniting approaches and requirements of the numerous standards, MASVS in the first place. OWASP MASVS is an industry standard for mobile application security and provides for 7 areas in which the mobile application is to be checked:

• Security of storage of sensitive data
• Usage of cryptography for sensitive data
• Authentication and authorization mechanisms
• Data security during communication transits
• Security of interaction with other applications
• Best practices in coding and security updates
• Protection against reverse engineering.

These are the most common groups of mobile application vulnerabilities, and each mobile application pentest usually covers all of them unless, of course, otherwise determined by the application functionality or architecture.

Different approaches and types of penetration testing exist. One can find around different typologies and nearly any of them will include the following:

• Network Pentest
• Wireless Network Pentest
• Web Application Pentest
• Mobile Application Pentest
• Social Engineering
• Physical Pentest

It is worth noting that all the above types of pentest require special skills and knowledge, so when choosing a supplier of pentesting services, you have to ask questions about a specific experience. Typically, a well-established penetration testing services company will provide at least a golden trio of penetesting types: network, web, and mobile.

Network Pentesting is one of the most common types of such security assessments, and it serves to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in the networked IT infrastructure, which includes not only firewalls, switches, and routers, but also servers, storages, workstations, printers, and so on. Such type of pentesting helps assess the level of preparedness for such attacks, as firewall bypass, router attacks, proxy server attacks, database attacks, and so on.

Wireless Network Pentesting is a specific type of network penetration testing, and focuses on connections between wireless devices and home or office wi-fi networks. One of the peculiarities of wireless pentests is that they are performed onsite because they need to be in the signal range. However, certain devices can be connected to a wireless network and allow a remote pentester to run the checks. Wireless networks should be pentested, as they are among the most common sources of data leakage due to their users’ relatively more random nature.

Web Application Pentesting serves to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses in web applications. This could be quite a sophisticated type of pentesting, because its scope can include font-end, database, back-end, and other varieties of web application pentesting. The scope should include every endpoint of every web application interacting with the user. Some of the tests, that might be a part of such security assessment include (for the front-end): Cross-Site scripting attacks, clickjacking attacks, form hijacking, HTML injection, Open Redirection, and others.

Mobile Application Pentesting is one more type of penetration testing, that is extremely popular today, as more and more businesses and public services start using mobile applications. Such pentests include searching for various vulnerabilities in mobile applications, such as insecure data storage, insufficient encryption, or data authentication mechanisms, input validation flaws, exposed APIs, and dozens more.

Social Engineering Pentesting stands a bit aside from other types of penttesting, as it relies more on social, communications, and, to some extent, design skills, in addition to the technical. When attempting a social engineering attack, a cybercriminal tries to lure the victim into disclosing very sensitive information, such as credentials, for instance. There exists a wide variety of social engineering techniques, such as phishing, vishing, smishing, imposter attacks, and dozens more.

Despite the seemingly less offensive nature of social engineering, it’s a dangerous illusion. A staggering 98% of all cyberattacks rely now on some elements of social engineering. Such attacks prove successful far too often, as the human remains the weakest link in the sophisticated system of cybersecurity.

So, social engineering pentesting, combined with cybersecurity awareness training, has become a cornerstone of today’s cybersecurity posture for any organization.

Physical Penetesting is another specific type of penetration testing, as it necessarily involves attempts to compromise some physical barriers, such as locks, cameras, fencing, different sensors, etc, safeguarding some infrastructure, systems, etc.

Such a type of security assessment might look somewhat too straightforward, but, upon consideration, it proves to be the easiest way to compromise in certain cases. If a criminal gets physical access to your networking equipment, that will be by far the easiest way into your network.

There are other types of penetration testing, as well, and we will talk about them in one of our coming articles.