Safety of Mobile Banking: Threats and Solutions

These days, smartphones change the way we live and interact. Mobile banking makes payments faster and more comfortable. However, the question arises: how to make a secure banking app? In this guide, we’ve revealed possible threats and their solutions.

These days, modern technologies and mobile app development are changing a lot of industries, including banking. People utilize their phones to fulfill banking operations like payments, transitions, and more. So, security becomes a primary issue.
A lot of enterprises tend to invest in security solutions to offer customers the highest privacy level. Of course, to find the right tech solution, you need to single out all the threats beforehand. 

In this guide, we’re going to discuss the top three security threats in the banking industry and the ways to solve them.

What Threatens Mobile Banking Security: Top Security Risks

A lot of popular mobile applications store information online. As a result, clients’ personal data like passwords, email, home addresses, door and alarm codes, location data, and so on, is becoming vulnerable to hackers.
The question arises: Can users trust mobile banking applications?
These days, people think that banking apps are entirely secure. However, there are a bunch of threats that can destroy banking software. Let’s discuss the top three security threats that every mobile banking app can face.

Threat #1. Unencrypted Data

You should think about data encryption beforehand. It’s essential to encrypt all the data stored within your financial institution or online. Using this method, you can be sure that hackers couldn’t use the stolen information at once.
However, if you leave the information unencrypted, the hackers can start utilizing data at once. It leads to serious problems for your banking institution.

Threat #2. Malware

It’s time to discuss one more risk — malware. It's impossible to guarantee that users’ devices like laptops and smartphones don’t have malware. Of course, malware can cause unprotected data and security attacks.
Due to malware, hackers can steal customers’ data and attack bank software solutions. Such situations are harmful to your reputation. You can lose our clients’ trust and loyalty. 

Threat #3. Spoofing

Spoofing is a new threat to banking mobile apps. Spoofing stands for the situation when hackers find ways to impersonate a banking website's URL with a platform that works the same. But, when a user fills in the login and password, the service steals this information. So, hackers can access customers’ personal information and can even steal money from bank accounts.
Additionally, modern spoofing techniques don’t use a different URL. They can steal data from the users that have entered the correct URL.



Of course, the modern IT market has a bunch of other threats. To give you a hint, we’ve listed them below:

• Unsecure third-party services
• Credential stuffing
• Phishing attacks

How to Protect the Data Making a Mobile Banking App?

So, the question arises — how should banks protect their tech solutions to detect and prevent fraud?

There are three popular options you can implement during mobile banking app development.

• Keep your software solution up-to-date: Timely updates allow for preventing most security threats. So, it’s required to keep your tech solution (mobile app or website) up-to-date. You also have to consider updates like OS, antivirus solutions, web browsers, and firewalls. In the case of ignoring these updates, you can face cracks in your cyber attack protection.

• Complicated passwords: Users should create complicated passwords. Such passwords should consist of figures as well as capital and ordinary symbols.
  

• Backups: To avoid losses, it’s necessary to do backups regularly. It allows you to protect relevant and confident data.
  

Of course, there are more reliable ways to protect your mobile banking app. We’ve discussed only the most widespread solutions. To create good protection, you should consult with qualified developers. They can offer solutions, depending on your product.

Every day modern technologies increase the protection level. For example, it’s possible to implement such solutions as biometric authentication, which makes apps harder to infiltrate. Biometric technologies also give an opportunity to authenticate users by measuring their physical, physiological, or behavioral features like fingerprints, gestures, voice, or signature. Data analysis systems utilize customers’ smartphones to collect personal information. For instance, they can collect some obvious things like IP addresses. However, they can also track various features and habits like left-handedness, haste, force, and others.

The Internet of Things technology can also be used to protect mobile banking apps. By the way, this option is gaining popularity these days. This powerful technology allows for preventing fraud. IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) improve the process of fighting cybercrimes.

The combination of these technologies collects information about financial transactions, making banking operations more secure and more convenient. We’ve already mentioned Artificial Intelligence technology for the banking industry. Let’s discuss AI more precisely. This technology allows for solving a bunch of issues connected to financial fraud. There are several cases, you can keep in mind. 

• The AI-based system can memorize a lot of fraud cases and identify hidden ways of fraud.
• The system works 24/7, so you can get instant results without any delays.
• The software powered by Artificial Intelligence can learn from customers and their behavior. It gives an opportunity to predict fraud in cases when actions contradict standard behavioral models.
  

As you can see, Artificial Intelligence is quite useful for the banking sector. AI allows for increasing the security issues of your banking software. This technology is mainly used in the fraud detection sector. Customers want to feel safe, using mobile apps for payments and various transactions. The more customers trust you, the more success your financial institution reaches.

Wrapping up our article, security means a lot for the banking sector. If you want to create a mobile banking application and reach success, you should consider all the security issues beforehand. Only in this case, you can gain users' trust and loyalty.
You need to think of a bunch of protection ways. It helps you to prevent threats and detect fraud. Of course, it’s easier to prevent fraud than to deal with consequences.

This post has been written by Vitaly Kuprenko from Cleveroad.

Author’s bio
Vitaly Kuprenko is a writer for Cleveroad. It’s a web and mobile app development company with headquarters in Ukraine. He enjoys writing about technology and digital marketing.