With more people online than ever before (over half the world’s population), online security is very important. More people being online means that hackers, data thieves and other cyber criminals have more targets than ever. While sites and businesses are definitely hacked a lot, it is often applications that are the victim to these attacks.
As a result, if you operate a mobile application, security needs to be at the forefront of your mind. If not, you could easily fall victim to a data breach. Not only can these hurt your reputation in a big way, but they can also cost you a lot of money. Because of this, it is important to make your app as secure as possible. So without any further ado, this article is going to look at a few different ways that you can up the security of your mobile application.
Use the Tools at Your Disposal
While the explosion of the internet has brought about a lot more data breaches, it has also brought about a lot of helpful tools. Many of these tools can actually help your business or app become more secure. For example, using log analysis and log management by Loggly is a good way to ensure you always know the status of your app. Tools like this will alert you when any potential error or event occurs and monitor everything to allow you to quickly identify and fix and issue before it becomes larger.
Do your research on the types of tools that could help your company. Many are quite affordable and some might even be free. Either way, spending a little to use these tools could save you a lot of money and headaches in the future. Other tools that can help the security of your app are things like firewalls, anti-virus software and countless others.
Utilize High Levels of Authentication
One of the biggest ways that hackers get into systems is simply by entering the right password. It seems too easy, and oftentimes it is. If your users or employees use weak and predictable passwords, or share them with a phisher, a hackers job becomes much easier. As a result, it is important to use high levels of authentication to protect not only your app, but also your users.
All employees should be aware of how to watch out for phishing emails, and should all use strong passwords on their app-specific accounts. This includes using passwords with numbers, letters and symbols. These passwords should also be changed every couple of months, too. You should also make sure to design your app in a way that will ensure all users use strong passwords. Even a few users getting their accounts hacked can be a bad look for your app. The harder you make it for hackers to guess passwords, the more difficult it will be for them to gain access to your app or user accounts.
Test Everything
While it might seem quite obvious, you might be surprised to find out many different developers simply don’t test their code. Unfortunately, with how quickly many apps are developed and deployed, many developers will take shortcuts when it comes to testing. However, this can have dire consequences for the security of your app.
Testing your app in a variety of ways is not only good for functionality, but also security. You can perform penetration testing or can test for data security issues. You can even test how your app will perform in a variety of different situations, to ensure your app’s security will always be up to par. In order for your app to be as secure as possible, you need to be sure to test frequently. New security loopholes can rear their ugly heads at any time, so be sure to review your code and app on a regular basis.
In conclusion, hopefully this blog post has been able to help you increase the security of your mobile app.
