Phishing attackers have found new ways to disrupt your privacy and to gain personal and financial benefits through cyber-attacks, thanks to the modern technology. Phishing is a common attack that usually works by sending emails that looks like coming from an authentic source but actually a phishing attack and trick you into wiring money or following links to get your login credentials, etc.
Recently with the increasing trend of mobile phone use, cybercriminals are seeking ways to exploit the apps to get the benefit. But with mobile devices, phishing is different. Although you can receive emails on mobiles and open phishing websites but with the mobiles, it is less likely for a user to open links through mobiles to sign in to their bank accounts. With the mobile phones, phishing is usually done through mobile apps.
How Phishing Attacks Is Done Through Mobile Apps?
A mobile application is usually a self-contained entity but still there are two possibilities to manipulate mobile apps and create a false sense of trust that can be used for phishing purposes.
The first option is a fake application pretending to be a legitimate one. This is quite a common issue with Android platform as the users find ways to download apps other than Google Play in order to get cost benefits and to unlock full features. iPhones that are jailbroken are also at higher risks of installing such apps. The Android .apk and iOS .ipa apps may be phishing apps so should be alert while installing these apps on your mobile phones.
A cybercriminal may get his hands on the original app and create an app looking just like the original one and even work like the original one but may add features like saving records such as username, password, security number, etc. and use it for malicious purposes later. Such apps are distributed to various platforms so that these apps can easily be searched and installed.
The second option is modifying the content of an application. Some mobile apps simply display the web content through an internal browser. The man-in-the-middle can be leveraged to modify the web content for their own benefit.
Preventing Mobile Apps Phishing:
You can easily prevent mobile apps phishing using the mobile apps monitoring. The apps you download on your mobile phones are monitored by your security company to make sure you don’t end up installing a phishing app.
