Freely subscribe to our NEWSLETTER

With a proactive, store-first scanning mentality, RiskIQ observes and categorises the threat landscape as a user would see it, monitoring both the well-known stores like the Apple App Store and Google Play and more than 120 secondary stores around the world. RiskIQ also leverages daily scans of nearly two billion resources to look for mobile apps in the wild. Every app encountered is downloaded, analysed, and stored to record changes and new versions.

The report gives a snapshot of 2020’s mobile threat landscape and dives into emerging trends for 2021.

2020 key findings include:

• Overall mobile apps available grew 33 percent
• RiskIQ’s Internet Intelligence Graph catalogued 30 percent more apps in 2020 but noted only 102,312 blacklisted apps, more than 67 percent fewer than in 2019
• Play store dropped an impressive 60 percent in 2020. RiskIQ found that blacklisted apps have now fallen in Google Play for two consecutive years
• Despite blacklisted apps falling 67 percent, blacklisted feral apps rose nearly 58 percent

This hidden mobile threat landscape is a branding and consumer trust nightmare for businesses. Even though an organisation doesn’t own or manage a copycat app, it’s still part of its attack surface because the copycat app is leveraging the organisation’s branding and targeting its prospects, customers, and employees. Security teams must detect and address them.

Extending security and IT protection outside the firewall requires mapping these billions of relationships between the internet components belonging to every organisation, business, and threat actor on Earth. These include mobile apps. RiskIQ built its Internet Intelligence Graph to prepare enterprises for this reality by enabling them to discover unknowns across their attack surface and investigate threats to their organisation.