Protected Media

The newly appointed Vice President of Sales, Russell Isaacson, will leverage his proven business development experience to help North American companies ensure the legitimacy and effectiveness of their digital media investments.

Previously Russell was VP of Brand Partnerships at Sovrn Holdings.

Founded in 2014 by network security experts fighting cyber criminals for over 15 years, Protected Media has experienced 400% growth over the past year and currently has over sixty customers worldwide, including Revcontent and Smaato. Protected Media provides an innovative cyber security solution that ensures that every digital ad – display, mobile or video – is properly located, visible, and seen by real people.

“Our rapid growth affirms our ability to expand, lead and innovate,” said Asaf Greiner, CEO of Protected Media. “Russell’s proven experience building long term relationships and his vast network in the online marketing industry will enable us to gain a further foothold in the US market.”

The post Ad Fraud Solution Provider Expands Global Footprint appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The big hesitation? Millennials worry about identity fraud and general security, according to August, 2016 research by Mitek, a mobile capture and identity verification provider.

True, there is a substantial number of millennial smartphone users in the U.S., Canada, and UK who do regularly transact via mobile (every day, or several times per week). But the most worried of millennials do so perhaps once a month or just a few times per year.

Mitek’s report showed that “one in five said they used their mobile device to pay for things once or twice a month, and 9 percent said they only did so a few times a year. Just 10 percent said they never conducted transactions via mobile.” The percentage citing security concerns was much higher.

“Nearly half of millennial smartphone users in North America and the UK said their concerns about the security of their data were a barrier to conducting more transactions via mobile,” reported eMarketer. “And just as many respondents said they were worried about identity fraud.”

Of course, there are technical issues as well.

“About 20 percent of respondents felt that there were too many steps in the process, and overall, many mentioned that the mobile experience was not good enough to transact via. In fact, more than a quarter felt that the mobile user experience isn’t as good as the desktop experience, and 19 percent felt that the mobile user experience isn’t good as the in-person experience,” according to eMarketer.

The post Millennials Might Pay Via Mobile More, If Security Was More Dependable appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Mobile Malware: A Serious Threat

According to a 2016 report by Nokia, malware attacks are now more common on mobiles than desktops. Using malware detection technology deployed across 100 million devices, Nokia found that smartphones now account for 60% of malware attacks.

Possibly the most (in)famous incident in recent months came with the HummingBad malware. Reportedly originating in China, the malicious code found its way into at least 10 million Android devices. Since the advent of smartphones, the general consensus has been that Android devices are more vulnerable than their iOS counterparts. The HummingBad incident certainly struck a blow to the platform’s security credentials, but it’s not all one-way traffic anymore.

After a wave of increasingly sophisticated attacks, iOS devices have also been under scrutiny in recent times. Indeed, the equally famous XcodeGhost managed to find its way into the App Store through a series of poorly coded apps. Although the offending items were later removed, it went to show that iOS devices can be just as vulnerable as Android.

Understanding Web Application Security

As defined by Incapsula, web application security is the process of protecting online services against threats which exploit “vulnerabilities in an application’s code.” To implement an effective security regime, app developers need to understand the latest web application vulnerabilities. Using OWASP’s list of common threats, Incapsula suggests that SQL injections, remote file inclusion, cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery are the most serious dangers to web applications.

Using this as a basis, any company with an online and mobile presence should be looking to deploy a range of techniques to block the flow of malicious traffic. Web application firewalls (WAFs) are one of the most effective methods as they not only work with existing systems, but they provide an active barrier that’s constantly monitoring the credentials of inbound traffic to a network.

The features offered by WAFs are perfectly suited to protect apps and their users. Indeed, by harnessing the power of a constantly updated signature pool, WAFs can instantly identify bad actors. In addition, the ability to leverage reputational and behavioral data means that WAFs can gain industry-specific insights into incoming traffic and, therefore prevent new threats from penetrating the system.

Maintaining Consumer Confidence

The combination of features offered by WAFs helps to secure mobile web applications and shouldn’t be overlooked if you’re running a business. Don’t forget that building and maintaining consumer trust should always be one of your top priorities.

Although the analysts at the Ponemon Institute have calculated the cost of a security breach to be $158 per lost record on average, the equation doesn’t stop there. When you consider the damage to a company’s reputation after a hack goes public, this cost dramatically increases. Of course, it’s possible to rebuild a brand’s image through clear and open communication about the security breach, but the reality is that it’s tough for companies to fully recover.

In essence, a vulnerable mobile app is not only a danger to a company’s bottom line, but its reputation. And without a solid reputation, a company’s day are numbered.

The post Why Security Should Be a Key Consideration for Marketing Professionals appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The Cybersecurity Excellence Awards is an annual competition that honors individuals, products, and companies that demonstrate excellence, innovation, and leadership in information security.

This award complements other IoT security honors Arxan has received, including the 2016 Cyber Defense Magazine Infosec Award for Best Product — IoT Application Protection, the 2015 IoT Evolution Award for IoT Excellence, and the 2015 Smart Machines Innovation Award for Application Protection of the IoT.

“Congratulations to Arxan Technologies for being recognized as the winner in the Internet of Things (IoT) Security category of the 2016 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards,” said Holger Schulze, founder of the 300,000-member Information Security Community on LinkedIn. “With over 430 entries, the awards are highly competitive, and our winners reflect the very best in product innovation and excellence in the cybersecurity space.”

Building on its IoT and Mobile application security leadership, Arxan has also made two strategic executive appointments.

We’re told that the company has named Mandeep Khera as Chief Marketing Officer. Khera brings more than two decades of marketing experience in application security, SIEM, Big Data, IoT, Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP), and other enterprise Software/Saas/Cloud solutions. Khera’s appointment follows another strategic hire at Arxan, that of Jim Love who was recently appointed as Senior VP of Worldwide Sales.

The post Arxan Honored for Mobile and Internet of Things Application Security appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

In a recent competitive analysis, ABI Research, a leader in technology market intelligence, analyzed the importance of software security. The firm forecasts that the security testing market will grow to $6.9 billion by 2020.

Still, there’s some resistance.

“The biggest challenge for company software developers lies in market forces and funding,” says Monolina Sen, Senior Analyst at ABI Research. “Their incentives, and consequentially their priorities, are tied to implementing new features and meeting deadlines. With companies always aiming to shorten product cycles, app security is usually among the first add-on to be cut.”

Traditionally, security audits and quality assurance testing happen toward the end of the development cycle, by which point most security issues are expensive to fix.

“The changing threat landscape and increasing frequency of application attacks, however, is forcing security-focused organizations to more adequately address web application security through secure software development. As such, application security testing is becoming crucial for organizations to adhere to compliance regulations, while at the same time defending themselves from security attacks,” a provided statement reads.

In its report, ABI Research reviewed the software security approaches of six industry vendors: Acunetix, Checkmarx, Cigital, IBM, Qualys, and Veracode. The report highlights current software security development trends and provides insight into the secure software development solutions existing in the market, as well as their effectiveness.

The report can be accessed here.

The post ABI Research: Security Testing Market Should Grow to $6.9 Billion by 2020 appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The following is a guest contributed post from Mark Laich, VP of Security Solutions, SnoopWall, Inc.

Millions of consumers no longer visit a bank to deposit checks or conduct financial transactions. Instead they rely on the convenience of using their mobile devices to send money, view account balances and bank online.

The same is true for how they spend their money – the shift from brick and mortar to e-commerce to m-commerce is already well underway.  Think about it – how many times do you use your smartphone to research a product or purchase one?
Maybe you’re going out to dinner tonight and you’ve already filled your Apple Pay, Google Wallet or other wallet technology with all of your credit-card information. Ever wonder if you could be pickpocketed wirelessly? Could an app you trust already be stealing your personally identifiable information (PII)? Sadly, the answer is yes.

Many financial institutions and retailers have launched mobile apps in the past 18 months to respond to demands from their customers who want the convenience of 24-hour, anytime/anywhere banking and shopping. Mobile banking apps help build customer loyalty, and mobile-banking transactions are significantly cheaper for banks compared with transactions that require employee interaction.

Mobile-retail apps capture consumers’ buying impulse at the moment they occur, and allow for easy comparison shopping – the potential for finding an item cheaper is a quick tap away. Because more and more banks and retailers are making the investment to develop a mobile app, having one has gone from being a competitive differentiator to a “must have” to compete for consumers’ business.

And once a bank has made that investment, there is a concerted effort to encourage customers to use their mobile-banking platform. The same holds true for retail. Amazon and others will do anything to get you to shop online from your smartphone or your tablet.

But the growth of mobile banking and retail apps also means that more people are at risk for identity theft and the hacking of sensitive personal and transaction data by cyber criminals who plan to commit fraud. These apps are used on devices that often aren’t safeguarded from security holes. Most people have between 30 and 75 apps on their mobile device, and of course, when apps are installed on a device, users must grant multiple permissions for accessing a device’s location, SMS capabilities, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, camera and other device resources.

Some of these resources are used for the apps to do their intended task, but often apps demand resources that can open up a device to security vulnerabilities.  Unfortunately, when consumers install an app on their mobile devices, few of them read all the permissions the app requests to make sure it isn’t asking to use device resources that might be suspicious.

This issue is highlighted by a report from Gartner Inc., the technology research company, which concluded 75 percent of apps in the major app stores fail basic security tests. Gartner defines this as an app using mobile-device resources that have nothing to do with the intended function of the app. Rather they can be used to eavesdrop on other apps that are running concurrently to collect data about the consumer. The rationale is that the collected information can be used for data analytics to help with targeted mobile advertising.

However, this has given cyber criminals a rather large attack vector to commit ID Fraud by using malware that looks like trustworthy apps to steal PII and financial transaction data from mobile banking apps, or to steal your credit-card information from your retail apps that reside on the same mobile device.  This type of malware disguised as “trusted” apps has hundreds of millions of downloads from the major app stores.

Worse yet, this new form of malware is undetected by anti-virus and able to circumvent encryption, biometrics, tokenization, sandboxes and authentication. The result is that using mobile-banking apps to conduct transactions is similar to using an ATM to withdraw cash in a dangerous area with criminals lurking around, or handing your credit card to a stranger, in public, who is using the old-fashioned carbon copy credit card imprinter to take your order.

Another popular technique for cyber criminals is spear-phishing attacks – which take the form of email and text messages that appear to be from an official source or someone you know, usually garnered via a social-networking site. These messages can then install monitoring software covertly on the mobile device. Monitoring software can access most mobile device activity and resources, thereby stealing consumer data just like the malware downloaded from an app store.

Most consumers are unaware of these types of threats, and even when they are aware, they don’t take actions to protect their security and privacy until it is too late. On the other hand, financial institutions carry the liability associated with the fraud that results from data stolen from mobile banking and retail apps. In a U.S. landscape where almost 1 billion PII records have been compromised and there is identity fraud totaling $24.7 billion in losses – according to statistics from Privacyrights.org and the Department of Justice – greater safeguards are needed to protect consumers’ financial data.

At the same time, it is important not to intrude or detract from consumers’ mobile banking or retail experiences. Financial institutions and retailers can’t solely depend on consumer awareness and training, nor can they make it complicated for consumers to protect themselves.

For better or worse, the modern-day consumer has become enamored with using their mobile devices for apps such as social networks, location-based services, and games on the same device on which they want to do mobile banking and mobile commerce, thereby compromising their security and privacy. What financial institutions and retailers need is new, innovative security technologies that deliver an optimal balance between protecting consumer data and being un-intrusive to consumers’ total mobile-device experience.

In this way, their mobile banking and mCommerce apps can operate in a safe and trusted environment even when multiple applications are running concurrently. By working with companies that specialize in these types of new security technologies designed to thwart zero-day threats and malicious eavesdropping apps, financial institutions and retailers will not only protect themselves from liabilities, they will also be successful at convincing more of their customers to use mobile banking and mobile commerce, thereby increasing the ROI of their mobile-app investment and their operating efficiency.

Finally, as we look forward to what many believe will be the rapid adoption of mWallets in 2015, you must understand that they are inherently insecure because they operate on already infected devices. It’s time to take a completely radical, proactive approach to securing consumers’ data as the financial, transaction-based world shifts onto our smartphones and tablets.

This year marks the beginning of a new wave of enablement, opportunity and mCrime.  Where there is mobile banking, mCommerce and mWallet there will be mCrime.  Assume it comes in the apps as innocent as that flashlight app you recently installed, because if you don’t, you’ll be left in the dark missing your identity and your wallet.

The post 2015: The Year of mCrime appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The goal? To “make it easier for enterprises to manage employees’ use of mobile devices and business applications,” which benefits BYOD and COPE programs.

Syntonic made the announcement on the first day of Mobile World Congress 2015, where the company is exhibiting Syntonic DataFlex for Enterprise.

With Syntonic DataFlex for Enterprise, KNOX Workspace devices are enabled to provide split data billing as a value-add service for KNOX integrated Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) providers. Syntonic DataFlex for Enterprise is available now for commercial deployment.

“We believe our integration with Samsung KNOX will play a significant role in accelerating the adoption and efficiency of corporate BYOD and COPE programs,” said Syntonic CEO Gary Greenbaum. “The intersection of mobile workforce productivity and personal use for mobile devices has made it clear to CIOs and CFOs that work is no longer bounded by location; work can be performed anywhere, on any device.”

More info on Syntonic is available here.

The post New Coupling Makes it Easier for Enterprises to Deploy Employee Mobility Programs appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

As we understand, David Kleidermacher has joined the Company as Chief Security Officer.

According to an announcement from the smartphone maker, Kleidermacher assumes responsibility for the global Product Security organization, leading efforts “to ensure BlackBerry’s continued leadership in secure enterprise mobility.”

In the coming days, he will begin overseeing security-specific research and product development, and BlackBerry’s product certification and approval program.

“David is an outstanding addition to our best-in-class security team, and he will help extend BlackBerry’s gold standard of security as we work with customers to meet new cybersecurity challenges,” said John Chen, CEO of BlackBerry. “In particular, David’s knowledge of securing the Internet of Things and embedded systems will be invaluable as we execute on our strategy and continue to expand our management of the world’s mobile endpoints.”

The post BlackBerry Bolsters Security Expertise appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

The coupling effectively merges Good’s app container and broad app ecosystem with the Samsung KNOX enterprise security platform for Android.

“The launch of Good for Samsung KNOX represents the next step in the partnership between Samsung and Good to deliver world-class mobile enterprise security solutions, first announced at Mobile World Congress 2014,” a provided statement reads.

This joint solution creates the most secure solution for enterprises and government agencies looking to accelerate their Android programs to drive secure mobile productivity. Good is now the only enterprise mobility management (EMM) provider whose secure container platform and app ecosystem is integrated directly into the KNOX security stack.

“The largest companies in the world trust Good Technology as the secure mobility leader, including all of the Fortune 100 commercial banks and other industry leading companies in over 190 countries,” said Christy Wyatt, chairman and CEO of Good Technology. “By partnering with Samsung to integrate our container and secure app ecosystem with the KNOX platform, we are delivering a comprehensive, layered solution to secure Samsung Android devices in the enterprise.”

The post Android Devices for Enterprises, Government Gain New Mobile Security Solution appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.

Thanks to this win-win partnership, ManageEngine says it will bolster its desktop and mobile device management (MDM) software with advanced mobile device management capabilities.

Chief among these capabilities is that IT personnel can secure Samsung devices without invading user privacy.

Mobile device usage among employees continues to grow at a tremendous speed, driven by user-friendly trends like BYOD. Understanding this in enterprise mobility, Samsung Electronics, a global leader in digital media and digital convergence technologies, has developed the KNOX platform to provide a comprehensive security solution for enterprise Samsung mobile devices.

“In 2013, we partnered with Samsung to support SAFE devices. Now, we’re adding KNOX capability to elevate that partnership one step further,” says Mathivanan Venkatachalam, director of product management at ManageEngine. “This enhanced security feature helps IT teams exercise precise control over the corporate data accessed by employees. And it provides flexible mobile device management operations without compromising on data security.”

The post Opportunity KNOX for Samsung in New Partnership appeared first on Mobile Marketing Watch.