Mobile Threat Defense: BlackBerry and Samsung Partner to Enhance Protection

The pandemic-fueled increase of remote workers has caused mobile and BYOD (bring your own device) usage to soar across enterprise organizations and small businesses. Predictably, it didn’t take long for cybercriminals to cash in on the boom market in business mobility.

With approximately 5.3 billion mobile device users now roaming the planet — more than 90% relying on “smart” or internet-enabled devices — the preponderance of sparsely protected mobile assets has created a “moveable feast” for online predators.

These devices are increasingly targeted by mobile-optimized attacks, including adware, banking Trojans, malware, and remote access Trojans (RATs) – all growing in frequency, sophistication, and cost to victims.

Android Devices Are Being Targeted

Attacks against Android™ devices are happening on a significant scale. Here are some of the latest numbers:

• 97% of organizations have contended with mobile malware threats that leverage various attack vectors.
• Banking malware threats on Android devices increased by 80% in 2021.
• Last year, adware accounted for 42% of new mobile malware worldwide.
• 47% of free Android antivirus (AV) programs cannot effectively detect malware. Are BYOD employees relying on free AV programs?
• Mobile malware apps that provide backdoors into phones are infiltrating via SMS or text messaging. Some cybercriminals are paying monthly fees of $5,000 to rent weaponized apps that let them steal access credentials and sensitive data.

Mobile threat defense (MTD) strategies help disrupt the pace and severity of malware attacks. This includes improving the overall security hygiene of your organization’s mobile users, and embracing modern mobile solutions that go beyond traditional security and enterprise mobility management (EMM).

BlackBerry and Samsung: Partnering to Provide Enhanced MTD

BlackBerry and Samsung joined forces in 2014 to provide high-security enterprise mobility management (EMM) based on BlackBerry UEM (unified endpoint management) and Samsung Knox, a proprietary security and management framework that comes pre-installed on most Samsung mobile devices. To combat the rise of mobile device attacks, BlackBerry is the first mobile threat defense (MTD) cybersecurity platform to provide Knox Enhanced Attestation services for Samsung Galaxy devices.

Now the partnership has evolved to extend to leading-edge endpoint protection, via CylancePROTECT Mobile™ unique artificial intelligence (AI) powered endpoint security equipped with Knox Enhanced Attestation for Samsung mobile devices.

CylancePROTECT Mobile is an advanced MTD solution that uses the power of AI with a prevent-first approach. It detects malware infections, prevents URL phishing attacks, and verifies application and device integrity. CylancePROTECT Mobile gets in front of cyberattacks as part of a zero trust approach, blocking cyber attacks before they have a chance to succeed and ensuring mobile devices are safe and secure.

CylancePROTECT Mobile with Knox Enhanced Attestation provides additional tools to ensure the security of Samsung devices with access to corporate information. These tools support the use of Knox Enhanced Attestation at regular intervals to validate the integrity of Samsung devices. Knox Enhanced Attestation is hardware-based, and can detect device tampering, rooting, OEM unlock, and IMEI or serial number falsification, in addition to performing application health checks. It not only ensures the current health of Samsung devices, but also provides a record of whether the device ever ran a non-approved configuration in the past.

Configured by an organization’s IT or security staff using the CylancePROTECT Mobile admin console, Knox Enhanced Attestation can help combat these threats. This should be a high priority for organizations that enable employees to use personal devices for work — especially for organizations that provide corporate data access to third parties, such as contractors. The additional value that CylancePROTECT mobile provides would significantly reduce the risk to mobile deployments from compromised devices.

In addition to the integration of Knox Enhanced Attestation, CylancePROTECT Mobile offers core features that include:

• Monitoring of mobile threats at the device, network, and application layers, detecting malware infections without adding SecOps overhead.
• Identifying security vulnerabilities and potentially malicious activities by monitoring OS updates, system parameters, device configurations, and system libraries at the application level.
• Integration with Microsoft Intune to enable threat alerts and remediation based on Intune's Conditional Access compliance policies.

As the most recent innovation to come from BlackBerry and Samsung, CylancePROTECT Mobile with Knox Enhanced Attestation also includes:

• Samsung Knox-Validated BlackBerry UEM for high-security endpoint management
• BlackBerry SecuSUITE for Samsung Knox secure communications
• BlackBerry AtHoc critical event management optimized for Samsung devices

To learn more, watch the on-demand session from the recent BlackBerry Security Summit 2022, where Samsung shared more about what it and BlackBerry are doing to provide enhanced mobile threat defense, "BlackBerry And Samsung Partnership Innovation: Mission-Critical Mobile Security."