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How a Hacker can Attack a Mobile Application

by Patrick Kehoe, Chief Marketing Officer, Arxan Technologies

We live in a mobile, personal world -- in 2014 IDC, TechCrunch estimates that ~1.9B mobile
phones will be shipped with nearly 1B being smartphones. Businesses that are most
efficiently adapting to today’s “App Economy” are the most successful at deepening
customer engagement and driving new revenues in this ever-changing world. However,
where business opportunities abound, opportunities for “blackhats” to conduct illicit and
malicious activity abound as well.

Application hacking is becoming easier and faster than ever before. Let’s explore why:

It’s Fast Recent research found that in 84% of cases, the initial compromise took
hours or less to complete

It’s Relatively There are automated tools readily available in the market to support
Easy hacking, and many of them are available for free!

Mobile Apps are In contrast to centralized web environments, mobile apps live “in the wild”,
“Low-Hanging on a distributed, fragmented and unregulated mobile device ecosystem.
Fruit” Unprotected binary code in mobile applications can be directly accessed,
examined, modified and exploited by attackers – especially specialists
from the new “black market economy” who realize greater efficiencies
and scale in app hacking

Hackers are increasingly aiming at binary code targets to launch attacks on high-value
mobile applications, across all platforms. For those of you who may not be familiar, binary
code is the code that machines read to execute an application – It’s what you download
when you access mobile applications from an app store like Google Play. Well-equipped
hackers seek to exploit two categories of binary-based vulnerabilities to compromise apps:

Exploitable Binary-based Vulnerabilities

Code Modification or Code Injection – This is the first category of binary-based
vulnerability exploits, whereby hackers conduct unauthorized code modifications or insert
malicious code into an application’s binaries. Code modification or code injection threat
scenarios can include:

• A hacker or hostile user modifying the binary to change its behavior – For example,
disabling security controls, bypassing business rules, licensing restrictions,
purchasing requirements or ad displays in the app – and potentially distributing it as a
patch, crack or even as a new application.

• A hacker injecting malicious code into the binary, and then either repackaging the
application and publishing it as a new (supposedly legitimate) app, distributed under

5 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – July 2014 Edition
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