Guide to Mobile App Protection Against Bots & Online Fraud

Malicious bots are not limited to targeting websites. They go wherever attackers send them, which tends to be the most popular endpoints across your mobile app, website, and APIs. In a world where more than 50% of global online traffic comes from mobile devices, it’s no surprise that at least 40% of bot traffic hits mobile apps.

As part of your online ecosystem, your mobile app and APIs need to be guarded just as efficiently as your website. Unfortunately, not all bot protection providers have prioritized mobile app protection—which can turn out to be an extremely costly mistake when a data breach occurs. As a result, it’s important to add bot detection to mobile apps and APIs.

We want to make sure you know what to look for in bot and online fraud protection that will safeguard your mobile app and APIs as thoroughly as it does your website and web apps.

The Rise of Bot Attacks on Mobile Apps

Attackers increasingly send their bots to mobile apps for a few reasons. First, because most smartphones worldwide run on Android, widely considered a more vulnerable operating system than iOS. Not everyone updates their smartphone the moment a new Android version becomes available, giving attackers the possibility to exploit vulnerabilities in millions of devices.

Second, because mobile apps often use weakly-protected APIs to pull valuable and often sensitive information from their back-end databases. In their API security and management report, Gartner predicted that APIs would become the most frequent attack vector by 2023. This can result in data breaches, data theft, and all types of fraud.

Such attacks are possible because attackers have access to increasingly sophisticated bots that are cheap, easy to set up, and easy to maintain. You no longer have to be a programming genius to send a swarm of bots to a mobile app or API. Basic knowledge of an easy-to-learn scripting language is enough.

Understanding Bots: How They Work & Their Impact on Mobile Apps

How a bot attacks a mobile app or API depends on what they’re programmed to do. Some bots continuously scrape all the available content from your app. Other bots try to overwhelm your app or even entire smartphones with DDoS attacks. Some bots try to break into user accounts or steal sensitive information from your back-end databases through your API. The point is, bots can work in a variety of ways depending on their goals.

Here’s how such attacks can impact your mobile app:

• User Experience: Bots significantly worsen the user experience. High levels of bot traffic lead to slow response times or even downtime. This will frustrate legitimate users and drive them away from your app.
• Data Breaches: Bots can exploit vulnerabilities in your app or its APIs to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data. This can lead to serious data breaches, with consequences ranging from loss of user trust to regulatory fines.
• Fraudulent Transactions: Bots can carry out fraudulent transactions, such as making purchases with stolen credit card details. This can result in chargebacks, damage to your reputation, and loss of revenue.
• Content Scraping: Bots can scrape valuable content from your app, such as product details or user-generated content. This scraped content can then be used by competitors or malicious actors to hurt your business.
• Increased Infrastructure Costs: High levels of bot traffic lead to increased server load and bandwidth usage. This results in higher infrastructure costs, as you may need to scale up your resources to handle the additional traffic.

Mobile Apps vs. Websites: How Mobile App Protection Differs from Website Protection

Protecting a mobile app from malicious bots is very different from protecting a website because the inputs and triggers are different. An algorithm must be designed specifically to collect and analyze multiple sensors and events on a variety of mobile devices in order to recognize intruders effectively.

Since most mobile apps use APIs to interact with back-end services and information, the APIs must also be protected. Unfortunately, hackers, content thieves, and other malicious bot operators love APIs and their easy access to stable, structured information. That’s likely why ⅔ of online commerce leaders said mobile app and API protection were key priorities for 2022.

According to our customer data, 70% of traffic on the most targeted mobile APIs is generated by bots! 

But tools for protecting APIs are limited and rarely sophisticated enough for advanced threats. Web application firewalls (WAFs) and API gateways, for instance, are powerless to protect mobile APIs from bots that use the correct API keys, authentication, and protocols.

Common Vulnerabilities That Bots Exploit on Mobile Apps

Cybercriminals have multiple ways of exploiting and attacking mobile app APIs with their mobile fraud bots, including:

• Reverse-engineering the API.
• Running the app with an emulator.
• Using automation software and a mobile farm.

Reverse-engineering the API, the most trivial method, is simple. By setting up a proxy between the mobile app and the API, cybercriminals record which endpoints the app is calling in order to fetch content, log in, and perform other actions. They then automate the same actions using bots.

Running the mobile app with an emulator duplicates both the hardware and software of a real device in order to perfectly imitate the original device’s behavior. Some of the real application’s actions can then be automated to scrape data or try credential stuffing, for example.

Using automation software on a farm of real mobile devices includes installing your app on devices that can click, scroll, copy, and so on, similar to bots running scripts on web pages.

How to Implement Mobile App Protection Against Bots: Step-by-Step Guide

• Server-Side & Client-Side Detection
• Ultralight SDKs for Fast, Easy Integration
• Vigilant Monitoring and Responsive Support

Most bot protection solutions lean heavily toward the web; mobile isn’t much of a focus. DataDome ticked all of the boxes.

–Bala Reddy, VP of Engineering at Poq

In order to detect all three kinds of unauthorized API access (API call without application, real applications on Android/iOS emulators, and automated applications on real devices), a solution must rely on a combination of server-side and client-side integrations.

1. Server-Side Detection

A server-side module is installed on the API to collect HTTP information and enforce blocking decisions made by the solution.

The DataDome solution is compatible with the vast majority of architectures and offers a choice of 15 modules, from Apache and Node.js to Java and F5 iRules. Learn more about F5 iRules bot protection in our dedicated blog post.

2. Client-Side Detection

A client-side module collects device properties and behavioral data when users interact with the app. It also displays a CAPTCHA to visitors whose API call was blocked by the server-side module.

DataDome’s client-side module is seamlessly integrated directly into your mobile app through extremely lightweight (less than 100kB) Android, iOS, and React Native SDKs, which can be integrated with your mobile app in seconds.

3. Ultralight SDKs

DataDome’s SDKs have been tested with all standard frameworks and mobile versions. By design, our SDKs support all third-party networking libraries, such as Alamofire or Moya.

The integration is codeless and there’s no code coupling. (But if, for any reason, you prefer manual integration, that remains possible too.) On Android, we provide a Gradle dependency to integrate our SDK. On iOS, a CocoaPods dependency will inject the DataDome SDK into the application. For React Native, use the npm package manager.

When we evaluated the DataDome SDK, we were blown away. It’s just a few kB and causes no latency issues whatsoever. You don’t even know it’s there. It’s a beautiful, elegant system.

–Mike Anderson, CTO at Tap Global

Obfuscated implementation ensures that reverse-engineering the DataDome code and understanding how the protection works is sufficiently difficult for hackers that it will not be worth their effort.

4. Vigilant Monitoring & Responsive Support

Another thing you want to keep in mind when choosing bot protection for your mobile app is the solution’s threat oversight, support, and responsiveness. Attackers operate 24/7, and although machine learning (ML) is a great tool to help automate and scale protection, real people need to research threats, analyze reports, and update the ML models frequently to stay vigilant.

They also need to be ready to answer your questions. For example, although DataDome offers real-time threat notifications and daily email reports to customers, we know some questions need to be answered by humans. Our support team is available 24/7 to help customers get the most out of our solution.

We compared various vendors (enterprise and SMB), and DataDome came up on top because of the functionality, effectiveness, support, and price… DataDome was the most effective in protecting our site and had the most customizability and support. Their team is amazing and always ready to help.

–G2 Review, Henry S, CTO

Taking Action Against Bots with DataDome

It’s not just your websites that are at risk of bot attacks; it’s your mobile apps and APIs too. They’re probably even more at risk than your websites, because many security solutions forget about them.

DataDome doesn’t.

Our bot protection solution protects your mobile apps and APIs just as much as it does your websites. DataDome provides its users with extremely light Android, iOS, and React Native SDKs. You don’t have to change anything to your existing app architecture to integrate DataDome and offer your users an app that’s much more secure. If you’re curious to learn more, book a product demo today.

FAQs

How do I protect my mobile app against bots?

Protect your mobile app against bots and cyberattacks by implementing powerful bot management software that works on all endpoints and protects your website, mobile apps, and APIs. Look for solutions with both client- and server-side detection, ultralight SDKs to preserve performance, and vigilant 24/7 monitoring and support.

What is anti-bot protection?

Anti-bot protection includes any software or tool intended to detect and prevent bots from performing malicious actions on the internet by stopping them at the first request. In the past, the main tools were web application firewalls, rate limiting, and even CAPTCHAs. Now, the most effective anti-bot protection is highly specialized software that can detect today’s sophisticated bots and keeps up with bot evolution.