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Article for: everyone interested in voting technology
Difficulty: moderate
Importance: If you are interested in secure accurate voting

The Aite Group did an analysis of the security of the mobile apps for 30 financial institutions. Alissa Knight the head investigator downloaded apps from 8 financial sectors:

Retail banking, credit cards, mobile payments, cryptographer, HSA, retail brokerage, health insurance, and auto insurance. She thought the results would be bad. They were worse.

I will not go into details, but someone's nephew seems to have written these apps. Someone who had never took a cyber security course. 29 of the 30 apps didn't protect the apps code. 80% had weak encryption or implemented decent encryption wrong. 70% had insecure random number generators so even if they had good encryption techniques it wouldn't help. Some even allowed attackers into the bank's data center.

1. If you don't need your mobile banking or credit card or payment app, remove it from your phone. I did.
2. If you need it, see if you can figure out a way to not need it.
3. If you must use it, try to have only a few apps on your phone, because any of them could access your banking information.

• Report summary
• ZDNet report
• Computer World report

Date: May 2019