Android: 100% of sports betting apps are losing out on cybersecurity

According to the conclusions of a study conducted on the security of the ten most downloaded Android betting applications, none of them would be completely immune to an attack.

Synopsis has published a report regarding the security of 10 most downloaded sports betting apps on Android on the Google Play Store. The conclusion is not pleasing: none of them is totally protected.

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Hackers looking into their case would have a lot to gain: these Android applications, downloaded more than 21 million times, represent as many wallets to siphon off and user data to steal. And according to the researchers, hackers could have a field day: each app has, on average, 179 vulnerabilities. These most often focus on a small portion of the open source components of the code, 8 percent of the usual 120+ packages, on average.

The many open source components used by Android gambling apps make them more vulnerable

According to Synopsys, the problem is that programmers use outdated open source software dependencies or not updated frequently enough. In its article, the company specifies that not all vulnerabilities are necessarily exposed and accessible to users, but the fact remains that some Android apps use dependencies that haven’t been updated for sometimes 12 years. Suffice to say an eternity, in the world of cybersecurity.

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“The use of outdated components is an indication that development teams are not properly managing their open source dependencies, which shows that they are not properly addressing the issue of security in general.” Worryingly, betting apps are far less secure than average. In a study of 3,335 Android apps released in 2021, Synopsys noted that of this number, only 64% of them had flaws. The figure is 100% for sports betting applications.