Eliminating the Mobile Blindspot: Attackers Have Moved to Mobile. Have Your Defenses?

Nothing has changed the business world more in the past 20 years than the rise of mobile computing. The ability to do everything from answer emails to access company databases on the go has revolutionized the way we work.

It’s dramatically boosted productivity, but it’s also expanded corporate attack surfaces and opened enterprises up to new security risks. 

Security teams previously focused on protecting a known population of company-issued laptops are now faced with the mammoth task of securing an infinite and often unknown number of smartphones and other mobile devices.

At the same time, mobile security has remained an afterthought for many companies, and attackers have taken notice. Armed with sophisticated social engineering techniques and new automated tools powered by artificial intelligence, hackers no longer need hacking expertise to breach systems, significantly increasing the potential for attacks.

Enterprises can no longer afford to ignore these rapidly growing threats to mobile security.

Related Resource: Beyond MDM: Why the Mobile Device is the Enterprise's Biggest Blind Spot [Whitepaper]

Mobile Is Where It’s at … and So Are the Attackers

Whether it’s for work or pleasure, we’re using our phones for pretty much everything. More often than not, tasks like work emails, mobile banking, watching videos, and posting on TikTok are all done on the same smartphone. That’s been great for productivity. And when employees use their own devices rather than a company-issued one, it saves organizations money. 

But online attackers follow the money and data, so they’ve moved to mobile, too. After all, there’s big money at stake for them. Financial losses reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center totalled $16.6 billion in 2024, marking a 33% increase from the year before.

And that’s true whether you’re talking about the most sophisticated and funded state-sponsored attackers, or your garden-variety script kiddies looking to make a quick buck.

Malicious nation-states are using zero-click malware, commercial spyware, and man-in-the-middle attacks to breach organizations. Meanwhile, government agencies around the world are also using sophisticated tools to search mobile devices at border crossings and other checkpoints.

Other attacks come from within. Campaigns backed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to get their operatives hired as remote IT staff at U.S. organizations have been well documented.

But attackers don’t need to be sophisticated to cause big problems, especially when they have help from AI. Techniques such as phishing, smishing, vishing, and SIM swapping don’t require much technical expertise. As a result, their popularity continues to grow.

Instead of looking for code flaws to exploit, attackers are using these methods, combined with social engineering, to trick employees into handing over legitimate credentials they can use to quietly gain access to systems. At the same time, AI-powered tools let attackers automate much of the work, allowing for more convincing attacks at a scale not seen before.

Anyone Can Be a Target

Think you wouldn’t fall for a social engineering attack? Don’t be so sure. Anyone can fall victim, and everyone at an organization is a potential target, from a company’s CEO down to its summer interns.

While some employees might go the extra mile to protect company data, they may not take the same precautions with, or even think about, their own. If they’re using their personal device for work and it’s compromised, it could put company data at risk.

The biggest problem is that mobile security hasn’t kept pace with the threats. Enterprises spend heavily on endpoint detection, network, and cloud security to secure company computers, but mobile devices are often overlooked, ignored, or treated as a compliance checkbox.

Many organizations assume that modern smartphones are “secure by default” because they run iOS or Android. That's simply not true. Mobile operating systems do not detect or stop the attacks that compromise enterprises today. Neither will your mobile-data management (MDM) software. MDM solutions help manage devices, but they won’t detect threats.

Finding a Solution

The shift to mobile work, along with attackers’ move away from exploits and toward social engineering, means security leaders need to rethink their priorities and defenses completely. 

Old-school mobile threat defense solutions built to detect attempts to jailbreak or root mobile devices don't work anymore. At the same time, containerization, which helps isolate certain processes and resources, only provides limited protection against kernel-level exploits and does nothing to prevent social engineering. Advanced exploit chains, like the recently discovered Coruna exploit, target the operating system itself, bypassing user interaction, application sandboxes, and many of the signals enterprises traditionally rely on to detect compromise. 

The fact is, human perspectives on mobile security have failed to keep up with the reality of the threat landscape. Many security professionals still view mobile devices as just more endpoints. In actuality, they’re the primary endpoints and need to be treated as such.

But change is coming whether organizations want it or not. Regulatory pressures and compliance requirements are increasingly addressing mobile devices and security. Last year, the average cost of a data breach in the U.S. rose 9% to a record $10.22 million, partly due to higher regulatory costs. Cyber insurance companies also have taken notice and are now extending their endpoint-control requirements to mobile devices.

What Organizations Must Do 

The answer to these ever-increasing problems isn't complicated, and companies like iVerify can help detect the sophisticated attacks that traditional MTD and MDM miss while protecting employee privacy. 

The first step to bolstering your device security posture is recognizing that mobile isn’t just another endpoint. It’s an organization’s authentication hub, communication center, and access point for most corporate resources.

The rest is pretty simple:

• Close the security investment gap: Mobile security requires the same rigor and funding as traditional desktop security. An organization’s security professionals need visibility into what’s going on, the ability to detect and respond to threats, and adequate resources to protect company systems.

• Move beyond device management: MDM can enforce security policies, but it can’t detect and stop attacks. It’s a must, but it isn’t nearly enough to secure mobile devices. 

Real mobile security requires behavioral analysis, threat detection, and incident response capabilities.

• Build mobile into core security operations: Mobile device health and threat telemetry need to be integrated into security operations center (SOC) workflows, conditional access policies, and zero-trust architectures.

• Protect the entire mobile fleet: Everyone is a target, not just executives. All mobile devices with access to corporate resources must be protected.

Ready to level up your mobile security program? Book a demo of iVerify today.