We live in the 21st century here we can’t imagine our lives without a mobile. It is impossible for us to live without mobile. It is also important for every type of business to have a good mobile application. You should have a mobile application even if your business is small. Mobile applications are here to stay. They’ve become an essential part of our lives as our dependence on our smartphones has grown. How to hack a mobile app? Mobile app hacking is becoming easier and faster than ever before. Let’s explore why:

• It’s fast: – Industry research found that in most of the percent of cases, the initial compromise took “just minutes” to complete.
• It’s relatively easy: -There are automated tools readily available in the market to support hacking, and many of them are available for free!!!
• Mobile apps are “low-hanging fruit”: – In contrast to centralized Web environments, mobile apps live “in the wild,” on a distributed, fragmented, and unregulated mobile device ecosystem. The unprotected binary code in mobile apps can be directly accessed, examined, modified, and exploited by attackers.

Sysploy security offers one of the world’s broadest, most advanced, and most highly integrated enterprise security portfolios.

Data security

Mobile security

Threat protection

Cloud security

Syspoly security: Advanced security intelligence-14 software developing labs, 6000 researchers, developers, and subject matter experts, 12 billion events monitored daily… think is your organization protected?

How to hack a mobile app?

Mobile apps are vulnerable to attacks.

Confidentiality risk (reverse engineering or code analysis vulnerabilities): –

• Sensitive information can be exposed
• Applications can be reversed engineered back to the source code.
• The code can be lifted and reused.

Integrity risk (code modification or code injection vulnerabilities): –

• Application binaries can be modified.
• The run-time behavior of applications can be altered.
• Malicious code can be injected into applications.

1. Reverse engineering or code analysis: – As we grow older, we look for other ways to learn about the world. We learn that one of the best ways to figure out how something works is to take it apart. If you have successfully taken an item apart, you literally know it inside and out. This is reverse engineering.

How does it work?

If you understand how it works, you are aware of its vulnerabilities. This can be either positive or negative depending on your purpose. You can use reverse engineering to audit and find weaknesses in a system that you can either then fix or if you are a hacker or the system is malware, take advantage of

Ways to hack apps can be: –

• Application decryption
• Symbol dumping and analysis
• String literal code analysis
• Static or dynamic key lifting
• Disassembly/ recompilation of native code (Obj C/C++)
• Java/.NET metadata-based compilation

2.Code modification or code injection: – Code injection is the exploitation of a computer bug that is caused by processing invalid data. The injection is used by an attacker to introduce code into a vulnerable computer program and change the course of execution. The result of a successful code injection can be disastrous. Code injection vulnerabilities (injection flaws) occur when an application sends untrusted data to an interpreter. Injection flaws are most often found in SQL, LDAP, XPath, or NoSQL queries; OS commands; XML parsers, SMTP Headers, program arguments, etc. Injection flaws tend to be easier to discover when examining source code than via testing. Scanners and fizzers can help find injection flaws.

Code injection may be used with good intentions; for example, changing or tweaking the behavior of a program or system through code injection can “trick” the system into behaving in a certain way without any malicious intent. Code injection could, for example:

• Introduce a useful new column that did not appear in the original design of a search results page.
• Offer a new way to filter, order, or group data by using a field not exposed to the default functions of the original design.
• As with programs like Dropbox, add special parts that could be used to connect to online resources in an offline program.
• Utilizing the Linux Dynamic Linker, one can define a function with the same name as certain libc functions, link that function as a library, and override the use of the libc function.
• Some users may unsuspectingly perform code injection because input they provide to a program was not considered by those who originally developed the system. For example:
• What the user may consider a valid input may contain token characters or character strings that have been reserved by the developer to have special meaning.
• The user may submit a malformed file as input that is handled gracefully in one application but is toxic to the receiving system.

Another benign use of code injection could be the discovery of injection flaws themselves, with the intention of fixing these flaws. This is known as a white hat penetration test.

Ways to hack apps can be: –

1. Binary patching
2. Application re-signing and repackaging
3. Malware payload insertion

Conclusion: –

Build trust in your application. Contact Syspoly (System Polygon Pvt. Ltd) for more information about mobile app hacking and ways to protect your mobile application.