Monitor Threats to Your Apps with Digital.ai App Aware

Current Security Challenges

• Organizations are putting more and more apps out “into the wild” for use by customers and employees
• Unprotected apps are vulnerable to threat actors
• Organizations lack the ability to react to attacks on apps operating outside of their security perimeters
• Organizations lack visibility into when, where, and how applications are being attacked

As app development progresses, the necessity for greater app security increases. However, a significant majority of the millions of apps available from public app stores and countless websites are insufficiently protected against reverse engineering and tampering. This lack of security puts companies at risk of losing IP, customers, and revenue. Threat actors exploit unprotected apps to gain an understanding of an app’s code and how it communicates with back-office systems. The “working examples” of how to access back-end systems are included in applications by necessity. If the working examples are exposed, threat actors use them to conduct any manner of attacks such as application cloning, credential theft, cryptojacking, script injecting, and keylogging.

Protecting those working examples from being reverse-engineered starts with obfuscating code and providing a means to detect when and if apps are being run in unsafe environments. Once the code is protected, security professionals need the means to see when and where attempts to compromise applications are taking place so that they can take the necessary steps to remediate the attacks. The threat monitoring and reaction steps are what App Aware provides.

App Aware is the threat monitoring solution that complements the obfuscation and anti-tamper we provide in Digital.ai App Security. It reports not only when your app is put in an unsafe environment, but also when the guards that are protecting your code are tampered with. When combined, these threat monitoring capabilities give you extra time to react to attacks. And the information App Aware provides gives you the ability to react appropriately – either automatically or manually. The reactions you code into your protections can create custom application features, force step-up authentication, or shut down the app completely, depending on the severity of the threat.

See When Apps Are Under Attack or Run In Unsafe Environments

Digital.ai App Aware extends the concept of app protection by including the ability to detect and monitor threats, while also notifying your organization of attacks in progress. App hardening with integrated threat detection and monitoring delivers the most effective combination of protection capabilities that together are the key to preventing brand damage, financial loss, intellectual property theft, and government penalties. Digital.ai App Aware provides access to real-time attack information from the moment apps are published. This capability provides the data necessary to know if an app is under attack — while the attack is in progress — providing advanced warning and allowing corrective action to be implemented before an attack is fully executed.

Key Benefits

Timely and actionable information

App Aware integrates with your Security Information and Event Manager and runs either stand-alone or in your Sec Ops Center; it provides confidence through verification, real-time visibility into the types of threats facing apps “in the wild”, and the ability to optimize and adapt protections based on attack insights and trends. Additionally, you can react to attacks automatically by taking custom actions, forcing step up auth, or shutting down apps under attack.

Confidence through verification

App Aware provides operational reporting from the moment apps are published to give an understanding of the threat environment in which they are operating. It also delivers information from apps running on compromised devices (jailbroken or rooted) and reports when apps are run in potentially unsafe environments such as debuggers or dynamic instrumentation toolkits.

Provides Sec Ops Center Visibility

App Aware extends SOC visibility to the apps that are running outside of your firewall and in production – whether those apps are being used by your employees or your customers. Gain the ability to optimize and adapt protections based on attack insights and trends while reacting to attacks automatically by taking custom actions, forcing step up auth, or shutting down apps under attack. App Aware also easily integrates with your existing SIEM, BI, SOAR, or other fraud prevention platforms.

Best Practices for Threat Monitoring

If you’re building an app that’s soon to be released, and you’re not monitoring it, then you have no idea what’s happening! Is it being attacked? It’s likely – Over a 28 period in October 2022, 55% of all the apps we monitored were either run in a debugger or were running with modified code. Knowledge is power, and if you have a way to monitor what’s happening, then you can take the next steps needed to be able to ensure your apps are being used the way they’re meant to be used.

To learn more about our threat monitoring capabilities, check out our App Aware product brief and our OWASP MASVS solution brief.