In the past year, the number of specialized attacks, which target specific applications through means such as making malicious changes to the code, has sharply risen.
According to Digital.ai’s 2024 Application Security Threat Report, the likelihood of an iOS app having maliciously modified code grew from 6% to 20% in the last year. Similarly, for Android applications, the likelihood rose from 28% to 63%.
“We’re seeing that the appetite for cybercriminals continues to be insatiable,” said Wing To, general manager of Intelligent DevOps and Security at Digital.ai. “Threat actors are exploiting AI and low-code technologies to attack a growing number of apps—and benefiting from increased precision. Customer-centric enterprises are prioritizing protective measures for the applications their customers rely on daily.”
Overall, the likelihood of an app being attacked increased 8% in the last year. Gaming apps were the most likely to be targeted (76%), followed by financial services apps (67%).
Digital.ai says that the top reasons for the increase in attacks are tool democratization, increased jailbreaking, and AI increasing the productivity of malware developers.
The company’s research pointed to Android being more susceptible to attack, likely due to the fact that the Android operating system is open source. Android apps have a 94% chance of being targeted, compared to 70% for iPhone apps.
However, Digital.ai didn’t find any link between the popularity of an app and the frequency of attack.
Digital.ai’s survey was based on monitoring of global customer data over a four-week period in February 2024.
