Black Hat: RSA service to zap apps pretending to be from your company

LAS VEGAS — RSA Wednesday introduced a service at the Black Hat Conference to monitor far and wide for signs of phony corporate mobile apps, and to work with Google Play, Apple iTunes and other major app stores to remove them quickly.

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“These are apps that pretend to be connected to your organization,” says Rachel Stockton, manager of RSA’s data protection marketing group, about the Fraud Action Anti-Rogue Mobile App Service. “Hackers masquerade malicious apps under that identity.”

RSA, the security division of EMC, will work with its customers to identify fake apps, which Stockton says can be complicated by the fact that in larger companies, separate divisions don’t always inform each other about the apps they make available. But when a fake app is zeroed in on, RSA will work with several of the online apps stores to make sure it’s removed. In addition to Google and Apple’s apps stores, these include Amazon, Windows Mobile Market, AndroidZoom, Ovi, BlackBerry App World, Handster and GetJar.

The service, which starts at $3,000 per month, represents an expansion of RSA monitoring services, which also include anti-phishing and fraud intelligence.

Ellen Messmer is senior editor at Network World, an IDG publication and website, where she covers news and technology trends related to information security.

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