Appdome unveils Geo Compliance suite to thwart spoofing and enhance mobile app security

Appdome unveiled its new Geo Compliance feature set, allowing mobile brands to trust the user’s location and detect location spoofing, fake GPS apps, VPN use, SIM swaps and other methods used to circumvent geo restrictions in mobile applications.

Mobile brands already use Appdome to simplify and accelerate delivery of mobile app security, anti-fraud, anti-bot and other defenses in Android & iOS apps. Now, mobile brands can combine Appdome’s new, no-code, no-SDK, Geo Compliance features with any other mobile app defense features on its unified mobile app defense platform.

Mobile application commerce continues to rise rapidly. The geo-location integrity of the mobile end user and transaction data is critical. In many cases, Know-Your-Customer (KYC) policies, regulations like business licensing, advertising restrictions, consumer safety and privacy all rely on valid geographic data and restrictions in mobile apps. On top of that, mobile brands need a greater array of signals to detect fraud. They also need to ensure malicious users are not faking their mobile location to bypass geo restrictions or obtain access to offer inventory and services outside of an approved geography.

Putting the quality of the user experience center stage, these same brands need geo compliance to validate user identities in mobile applications, including in P2P and social-based mobile applications.

“Mobile brands have struggled to deliver true geo compliance,” said Tom Tovar, CEO of Appdome. “Geo-compliance products imposed the same problems as legacy mobile app security, anti-fraud and anti-bot products, namely, too many point products, siloed data, complex SDK integrations and too much work for the engineering teams. We’re solving that by bringing geo compliance into one unified, automated platform for mobile app defense.”

Legacy geo compliance, mobile app security, and anti-fraud products are point products, providing narrow detection and defense coverage. Using more than one of these point products in the same mobile app requires complex app-level code changes to overcome compatibility challenges and resolve in-app conflicts from overlapping feature sets. These challenges don’t exist when using Appdome, as all detection and defenses options including the new Geo Compliance features, come fully interoperable with all other 300+ Appdome defenses out-of-the-box.

“A breach of geo compliance can lead to negative publicity and damage a brand’s reputation,” said Rik Turner, Senior Principal Analyst at leading market research firm Omdia. “Geo compliance is a key part of any strategy to prevent fraud and stop service and program abuse related to location-based offers and services. Cyber and dev teams can implement geo compliance and other critical security defenses in their mobile apps using Appdome’s cyber defense automation system easily.”

With Appdome’s Geo-Compliance Service, mobile brands can detect:

• Fake location: Combat the growing threat of location spoofing, using a method to manipulate or falsify of the geographical location transmitted by a mobile device.
• Fake GPS apps: Detected Fake GPS Apps, used by mobile end users as a location service provider, when your mobile app is in use.
• VPN in use: Advanced techniques to detect attempts to bypass geographical restrictions using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).
• SIM swaps: Robust SIM swap detection, alerting brands to SIM card or eSIM changes, when other location variables remain unchanged.
• Random locations: Identifies mismatches in location telemetry from on-device settings or components, including manual overrides to on-device location services.
• Teleportation: Improbable location changes within timeframes.
• Banned locations: Detect when an app trying to be used in a country/region where the mobile brand does not allow use.
• Other Geo-Compliance features: several other geo-compliance features provide data and control to mobile brands with location-based services, offers and promotions.

The new Geo Compliance features can be combined with any of the 300+ mobile app defenses in mobile app security, anti-malware, anti-fraud, MOBILEBot Defense, anti-cheat, MiTM attack prevention, code obfuscation, and more in Android and iOS apps. All features are fully automated and built on-demand in the language of the mobile app by the Appdome platform, inside the mobile DevOps and CI/CD pipeline.

“Legacy geo-compliance vendors make two mistakes,” said Chris Roeckl, CPO at Appdome, “they try to recreate the massive investment Google and Apple have made to ensure accurate geo-location or rely on basic anti-emulator defenses to claim geo-compliance feature sets. With Appdome, brands can combine the best of breed in both solution sets and get comprehensive mobile app security and geo-compliance all in the same application with ease.”