Over the past few years, a new trend has been emerging; technology savviness has decreased and becomes less restricted to a specific age group. As a result, several business entities across all industries started organizing and creating mobile strategies accordingly. Now I am sure you must be wondering how mobile impacts the insurance industry.

Mobile apps are considered as a fixture in practically every element of our lives today and the insurance industry is no exception, especially since the field is more competitive than ever. Despite being outlines in banking and payments for app adoption, apps turn out to be one of the most common offerings from most providers, enabling customers to check and manage their claims, make payments, and other functions. Mobile technology is not just changing the way people interact with the insurance provider, it’s even affecting customer loyalty and expectations.
 

About the Hybrid Approach

There have been several advancements around app-based robo-advisors and chatbots due to which companies are focusing on mobile-only offerings. In today’s scenario, a firm rushes to stake their claim in the increasingly digital market and professionals have started to deploy the ever-growing hybrid app approach to cut down on development time and costs. App developers create the app in HTML or JavaScript and wrap it in an application layer that allows it to function on a mobile device.

One of the best advantages of choosing the hybrid app development approach is that the app can be developed as one base code and ported between different platforms, enabling the company to have a presence on both Android and Apple devices without the time and expense of having to start from scratch. In addition to this, there are so many frameworks available that make the process simpler and better. Other than insurance, the approach is being used by several other industries, particularly in mobile gaming and digital media services.

The risk involved:

Although, the approach successfully enables an insurance firm to deploy its app more quickly and widely; it also brings with a fresh set of risks. For example, as soon as the app becomes available for download, cyber criminals can immediately get hold of it and began searching for weak links in its security. Apps are at risk and anything with more sensitive information such as personal information or financial data including any insurance apps with any functionality around managing or making claims becomes the prime target.

Unfortunately, Hybrid mobile applications have the potential to introduce more threat than standard mobile apps as the JavaScript HTML source code requires less skill to reverse engineer and tamper with than native binary code. The moment the attacker becomes capable to access an app’s code, they get the power to modify it for a whole host of malicious activity. For instance, disabling security controls and bypassing other restrictions which would enable them to access and transmit data that should normally be secure. In addition to this, remote man-in-the-middle attacks, where data is intercepted as it is transmitted, are even easier. And the app can even be used as a vector to attack other applications on the device.

The solution: Protecting hybrid mobile apps

Like I said before, hybrid apps can be hazardous but insurers can still enjoy their reduced costs and development time without putting themselves and their customers at risk. All they need to do is seek help from a reputable hybrid app development company who have the potential to deploy additional security to counter the weak points.

One of the most effective approaches worth considering is to combine obfuscation with runtime protection techniques and apply them to the JavaScript code at the heart of the app. When combined with other approaches such as hiding text encodings and data values, Obfuscation renders code becomes an unusable mess for any attacker. Well, let me put it in simple words. This means that even if an attacker is able to access the code, it will be far more difficult for them to decipher anything useful from it.

Meanwhile, runtime protection essentially makes the app’s script self-defending. Anti-tamper controls can be woven into the code, enabling it to checksum itself in runtime. Which means each and every time the app is booted up, it will check its own code to confirm that it’s in its original state and has not been tampered with anything. Furthermore, it can be programmed in such a way that it directly responds to changes by becoming inoperative or even alerting the Hybrid mobile app developer. One of the popular technique used by the attackers is to lift the code from the app and run it in the JavaScript- based code that is used in hybrid apps.

In a nutshell,

By focusing on protecting the JavaScript at the heart of the app, insurers can continue to reap the benefits of hybrid apps without compromising on security, claiming a greater share of the digital marketplace by deploying across more platforms without incurring extra costs and development times.