In mobile commerce, your app is the heart of your shopping brand, representing the face of your company. It excites buyers, manages payment and return transactions, stores sensitive information like payment details, and delivers personalized user experiences that keep consumers coming back.
However, these essential functions also make shopping apps prime targets for a wide range of sophisticated cyberattacks. Among the most dangerous threats are attacks targeting various vulnerabilities, including but not limited to API weaknesses.
Shopping apps face risks from malicious actors exploiting insecure app code, network connections, and weak network protocols. These attacks can lead to breaches such as account takeovers, payment fraud, credential stuffing, and data theft, making comprehensive protection critical.
A range of threats facing shopping apps
Mobile commerce has transformed the shopping experience for the better, but it’s also exposed new attack surfaces for bad actors.
Shopping apps tend to process high volumes of transactions and store sensitive information such as payment card data, so attackers frequently use techniques like screen overlay attacks, credential stuffing, or network attacks to gain access to the app code, which can lead to breaches in user accounts or payment gateways. Account takeovers—where hackers hijack legitimate accounts—can result in significant financial losses for businesses and expose customers to further fraud.
For shopping apps, the integration of mobile wallets, loyalty programs, and personalized shopping experiences makes them an attractive target. APIs that power many of these features can be manipulated to steal or commit fraud. Even location-based promotions can be exploited through geo-spoofing, where hackers trick the app into offering discounts meant for a different region.
Shopping providers should consider application shielding
Shopping providers need to assess their app security early and often. Application shielding, like the suite of solutions offered by Verimatrix XTD, should be considered if:
- Your app is critical to revenue generation at your organization.
- Your app touches customer PII data, such as payment details, contact information, or loyalty rewards.
- Your app is not currently protected or only uses open source security tools, making it vulnerable to reverse engineering or tampering.
Apps lacking professional-grade, layered shielding can be easily reverse-engineered by bad actors with malicious payloads, which could lead to data breaches, fraudulent transactions, and a loss of customer trust. That’s why implementing a more robust, trusted application shielding solution is essential for protecting the integrity of your app.
Shopping app integrity without sacrificing user experience
Shopping app developers know that a slow, clunky app can harm app store ratings, create user friction, and negatively impact sales. Yet we know app security is a must-have. The challenge, then, is to strike a balance between ironclad protection and effortless app performance.
Verimatrix XTD protects shopping apps
Verimatrix XTD delivers a powerful, multi-layered app shielding solution designed to safeguard retail apps without compromising usability or performance. Its highly tunable protection ensures that app developers can balance security with a seamless user experience, a crucial factor for mission-critical apps like those in retail, banking, and delivery services.
XTD offers advanced security measures such as code obfuscation, root and jailbreak detection, emulator detection, and anti-tampering mechanisms, making it highly effective against common attack vectors. This flexible protection, combined with rapid deployment through zero-code integration, allows developers to respond quickly to threats or apply hotfixes without the need for costly downtime.
Code obfuscation
At the core of XTD’s shielding capabilities is code obfuscation, which conceals the logic and purpose of your app’s code while maintaining its functionality.
For hackers attempting to reverse-engineer your app, obfuscation makes the code much harder to understand and exploit. This is especially important in retail apps where attackers might try to uncover sensitive logic related to payment processing, loyalty rewards, or discount calculations.
By scrambling the app’s source code, Verimatrix XTD ensures that even if a hacker gets their hands on your app, they can’t easily decipher how it works or where to insert malicious code. This drastically reduces the likelihood of a successful attack.
Root and jailbreak detection
Mobile devices that have been rooted or jailbroken pose a significant security risk to apps. While many users root or jailbreak their devices for innocent reasons, doing so weakens the security controls that apps rely on.
On a rooted or jailbroken device, a hacker could install rogue apps that access your app’s sensitive data, steal credentials, or manipulate API calls.
Verimatrix XTD includes built-in root and jailbreak detection, ensuring that your app recognizes when it’s running on a compromised device. If such a device is detected, XTD can block the app from opening or accessing sensitive data, preventing any further exploitation.
Emulator detection
Hackers often use emulators to run apps in virtual environments, which allows them to study the app’s behavior, reverse-engineer its code, and uncover potential weaknesses.
Emulator detection is crucial for stopping these types of attacks before they begin. Verimatrix XTD detects when your app is running in an emulator and prevents it from being executed, safeguarding your APIs and sensitive data from prying eyes.
Anti-tampering mechanisms
App attacks often begin with tampering, whereby hackers modify the app’s code to inject malware, backdoors, or other harmful elements.
Verimatrix XTD incorporates robust anti-tampering mechanisms that detect unauthorized changes to your app’s code. By performing regular integrity checks, XTD can trigger defense responses like blocking access to the app or shutting it down entirely if tampering is detected.
XTD’s features and capabilities are especially useful in shopping apps, where attackers might try to alter promotional code logic, manipulate loyalty rewards, or create fraudulent transactions. Anti-tampering mechanisms ensure that any attempt to alter the app is met with an immediate shutdown, stopping the attack before it can escalate.
Additional XTD benefits
In addition to shielding, Verimatrix XTD enhances application security by protecting data and enforcing end-to-end encryption, supporting secure payment methods that comply with PCI-DSS and EMVCo standards.
It ensures that built-in methods like multi-factor authentication (MFA) are secure, offers robust session management with safe login/logout processes, and helps apps comply with key regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
XTD also provides real-time monitoring and observability of app behavior, allowing for the detection of anomalies over time. This comprehensive approach helps retail apps meet App Store and Play Store guidelines, keeping users’ data private and secure while offering an agile solution for fast fixes when needed.
Shopping app developers need app shielding
Shopping apps are under constant threat from hackers looking to exploit vulnerabilities and steal sensitive customer data. The consequences of a successful attack—whether it’s payment fraud, credential theft, or loyalty abuse—can be devastating.
If your shopping app handles sensitive data, resides in a public app store, runs significant logic on the device itself, or is critical to your organization’s revenue, app shielding should be a top priority.
