Those smartphone aps may have scads of useful features, but watch out, according to research firm Gartner. It predicts that through 2015, more than 75 percent of mobile applications will have failed basic security tests.
That s a particular problem for companies that let their employees use their own smartphones or other gadgets at work, the firm warned.
App stores are filled with applications that mostly prove their advertised usefulness, Gartner research analyst Dionisio Zumerle said in a press release. Nevertheless, enterprises and individuals should not use them without paying attention to their security. They should download and use only those applications that have successfully passed security tests conducted by specialized application security testing vendors.
Garnter noted that one type of test that s useful for mobile devices is behavioral analysis, which monitors a running application to detect risky behavior in the background. An example of that might be an application that plays music while surreptitiously accessing the user s contact list and sending the data to an external Web address.
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