Home > News

76% of Mobile Apps Have a Vulnerability, with Greater Chance on Android

By Laura Tucker
News Mobile Apps Vulnerability Featured

Android and iOS make it really easy to download multiple apps. Sometimes for the same function, such as browsing and photo editing. Depending on how heavy your phone and/or tablet use is, you need more than one browser and photo editor.

But that’s where we’re in danger. Three-quarters of all mobile apps have a vulnerability that can lead to hackers stealing anything you value on your phone, such as passwords, communication, financial information, etc. And if you have an Android, you have slightly more of a chance of having a flawed app.

Flawed Mobile Apps

Positive Technologies noted on their “Vulnerabilities and Threats in Mobile Applications” report that of the mobile app flaws, Android users are 43 percent at risk while iOS users are 38 percent at risk.

The most common vulnerability found in both mobile platform apps is insecure data storage, according to the report, with 76 percent having such a flaw.

Malware could exploit an astounding 89 percent of the vulnerabilities that were found. While you knew it was risky to jailbreak your phone, knowing it could put you more at risk, the report states attackers rarely need to access your device physically to hit you up with malware.

If it lands on your phone, it has the ability to ask for access to your data, if that permission is granted, the malware can send your data to the attackers.

“In 2018 mobile apps were downloaded onto user devices over 205 billion times. Developers pay painstaking attention to software design in order to give us a smooth and convenient experience, and people gladly install mobile apps and provide personal information,” explained Positive Technologies’ cyber security resilience lead, Leigh-Anne Galloway, in a press release.

News Mobile Apps Vulnerability Devices

“However, an alarming number of apps are critically insecure, and far less developer attention is spent on solving that issue. Stealing data from a smartphone usually doesn’t even require physical access to the device.”

In other words, developers spend so much time giving us all these exciting features, that they don’t spend enough time making them secure. Because the app looks like it could solve some problems or make things easier for us, we download it without a second thought.

Protecting Your Device and Data

Galloway suggests that to protect your device and your sensitive data, you should pay attention when apps request access to your device’s functions as well as its data. Be sure you do not agree to any unnecessary access. And of course, as always, don’t open unknown links that you find in text messages and chat apps, and only get your apps through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

Is this plausible? Sure. While at one point I downloaded apps willy nilly and granted every access they asked for, I’ve learned a lot. I still download a lot of apps – after all, I work in this industry, online tech writing, and I work in this industry because tech is always exciting to me. And 100 percent of my work is done on mobile.

However, I don’t grant access like that anymore now that we better understand the dangers, only when it’s necessary. And sure, I’ll download five or six apps when looking for a certain function, but the ones I decide I don’t like, I unload right away. I try not to hoard them.

Is this keeping me 100 percent safe? Definitely not. But the only way to be completely safe is to never use a mobile device. And frankly, there are vulnerabilities on desktops as well, so only if you stay off all tech are you 100 percent safe.

How do you keep your device and data safe from mobile app vulnerabilities? Let us know in the comments below.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.