Why Mobile Security Is Becoming a Critical Front Line in the AI Era

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Text Drug tv. You know, I, I was, as I told this gentleman, my next guest, it's always a pleasure to have a nail on, but it's even doubly as good when they spell their name correctly.

Let me introduce you to Alan Snyder. He's the CEO of now Secure Alan from one Alan to another. Welcome to Techstrong tv.

Well, thanks, glad to be here. And not only Alan, we get the match on the first letter to last name as well. Getting closer.

We're getting closer to the initials. So Absolutely. Alan.

S that would be tough if, you know, it's funny, I go to a a, a deli down here and they always, when you make an order, they take first name, last initial, and that's how they call you. I'm not able to come home with your bagels or something. I don't know what, you know, what they have there, but You never know what you're gonna get.

That's right. It's dangerous. Yeah.

It's a is. Well, that particular deli is bagels with. So, but anyway, um, Alan, it's great to have you on, as I mentioned, you're the CEO at now, secure, but give people a sense of how you got to that seat.

Yeah, so I've been in technology for my, uh, entire career. Started out as a developer and then let's just say progressed, uh, through, but I've been doing mobile now for, oh, better part of 20 years. At the beginning of where it started with Blackberry, through the iPhones, through, uh, device management.

And now what I love about where we're at now is that mobile's just ubiquitous. You don't even think of it anymore, right? It's just there.

Um, and it's been a fun ride and a journey to watch all of it progress and get, you know, in essence progressively more abstracted away that, you know, it's easier. You do more, you take these things for granted. But the good news is each of these build on one another.

And I think that that's the benefit of, uh, experience and being there from the beginning through, is really have a good understanding of how these things work under the hood. Uh, and the good news is you don't need to know that anymore. What you need to know is, here's what I need to accomplish.

This is what I want to do. Now go make itself so something goes wrong. You know, it's funny, I know what's going on under the hood, but otherwise, yeah, it should just be a productivity tool, right?

Make it better. You know, I just, so I'm in our text Strong studios. We have three different stats sets here at the sound stage.

This is my text strong TV interview set. I was down there at the, uh, Textron gang set earlier we were discussing and, and we were just discussing that very thing, al and that in today's world with, you know, living where we are living now with ai, what do you really need to be a developer? What do you really need to be a cyber person?

What do you really need to be a salesperson? What do you need to be? Anything?

Because maybe all you really need is just the ability to, to describe it well enough to an AI to, to do it with you or do it for you. And it's, uh, it's a crazy time to be alive, isn't it? I, I wrote my own mobile app, uh, two weeks ago.

Took me about, uh, oh, I'd say probably total all in 12 hours, uh, to build it using, 'cause I wanted to try one of the new AI platforms and I wanted to actually test the output against the, the security and privacy of the solution. So it did a great job of building a mobile app. It's got a lot of work and room for improvement in terms of securing and keeping it private.

Well, But you know what, to be fair, Al and I've been in security 25 years, first time through apps, they always have a lot of room for improvement for security because it seems security is always, you know, the last, the last thought or no matter how much we say how important security is, what a priority it is. It, it, it, you know, the, what was it last week? The whole T bot, t bots, open claw thing, you know, and how insecure those were.

And, and in spite of being insecure, and we, and we all reported on how there was no security in this thing, basically didn't stop hundreds of thousands or, or, you know, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people from using it. Yeah. Because it, there's an age, there's an age old problem in security.

Well, crazy me, a lot of this though, we just need to make it easier to do, right? Because if there's barriers, if there's friction, it's not gonna get done right As case in point as we look at it, right? And to me, and that's a big part of what now secure is trying to do, is make good security, good privacy, good governance, all of that incredibly easy and exceptionally cost effective.

So that at that point there's no reason not to do it. Right? Whether you're vibe coding an app, whether you're an enterprise building, an app, whatever it is, if it's, if I can lower the barrier, right?

And make it easy enough, I don't think anybody out there says, man, I really want to build an insecure app today. No, no one ever did. No one ever did, you know, about 15, maybe more years ago, I remember doing a podcast.

I had the CEO of, uh, MongoDB and the CEO of Couchbase. At the time, the NoSQL databases were quite the rage, right? They had just come out, they were storming the market.

And I asked them, I said, you know, a lot of people say no, sequel stands stands for no security. What's the story? And they said, and they said, they actually said this, when our customers demand security, we'll built it in.

And, and I, I, I thought it was a joke between you and me, but over the years I've come to realize that's probably true. When we demand it, when we make it truly that priority, it does. Alan, tell us a little bit of the no secure story.

What's the backstory here with not no secure, excuse me. No, I was gonna say, We're, we're, we're trying to prevent now no secure. Well, now secure.

We don't want no secure Secure that's right now secure. Uh, I'll go with, Well give us a little of the now secure. Go ahead.

So the now secure story is, I'll give you the, the, the real simple version, right? We take the attacker point of view for mobile apps. So we're gonna take your app and we're gonna do what the attacker's gonna do.

We're gonna reverse engineer it, we're gonna analyze it, we're gonna put it on a device, we're gonna run it. And we're going to, in essence, uh, take a deep dive, look at the app and everything. It's doing all the components, all the network traffic.

So we know everything there is to know about that mobile app. Then we take that data and we use it to find vulnerabilities. Great.

Don't want anybody to break into my app data leakage, privacy, great. Want to make sure that what's in the app stays in the app. We look at all sorts of things like are the third party components in there, the ones that, uh, you expected?

Uh, 'cause there's dependencies and transitive dependencies. Are they collecting the data that you authorize 'em to collect versus what we see is over collecting is a big issue. So we have the ability to look at all of those things.

And as it relates to ai, I can tell you if AI is in your mobile app, right? I can tell you if there's multiple AI in your, over in your mobile app, I can tell you what data that AI is ingesting. I can tell you when it changes, right?

So all of those things are really important because as mobile becomes more critical, uh, to the business, right? And I'll give you a good example. The, and this is super, this is happening every single year, and this is gonna continue to happen 'cause it's a demographic trend in, uh, fourth quarter during the holidays for retailers, when you look at digital sales, mobile was 53% of all digital.

And every year mobile picks up another one to 2%. So for those that are sitting there going, wow, mobile, it's not that important to my business, I would argue, go look at your data. It is actually the predominant way that customers and your, uh, employees interact with the business is through mobile.

And so it is the front door to your enterprise. It is the front door to your revenue. It is the way that it inter uh, folks interact with you.

And every year mobile apps pick up another two to three percentage points of market share. And that makes sense. 'cause what we see is the, uh, younger you are not just are you more likely to be mobile, you're more likely to be mobile only.

And that's the way interact. Sure. So this is actually really important to anyone building or using mobile apps, which is, that's the primary way that folks interact with you.

Now, that's the good news. The bad news is people aren't spending much attention. They're still fixated on web apps.

And not that they don't need to be secured, they do. But when you look at the importance to the business, it has shifted to mobile. Sadly, the focus and priority in spending has not shifted to mobile.

And that leaves a window for the attackers, which they are indeed exploiting. Actually, I was just looking, cisa just in, uh, issued a, uh, CVE on a, uh, medical records mobile app today, right? So patient, uh, you use it to, uh, ingest patient, uh, medical record information when they come into the emergency room.

Probably something you want secure. I want it secure. Sure.

It's everything else. But, um, you know, I, I want to, if we can kind of pivot a little bit in terms of ai, right? 'cause ai, look, mobile App Security was a sore spot and has been for as long as I remember.

Ai, you know, the thing about AI is it could be our greatest friend or our worst enemy, or maybe a little of both. How, how do you view overall sort of AI in terms of the mobile app security space? Yeah, so I, I'll put it in three categories, right?

So the big thing that we're announcing is, uh, a new capability that we call AI Navigator. And what that is, is we are using AI to solve what has been a, actually a historical challenge for mobile apps. Not just for security testing, but for functional testing, which is how do I authenticate consistently and reliably without having to do lots of scripting and without, you know, how do I do it with a, you know, the snap of my fingers?

And so what our AI navigator capability does, it is truly add your test credentials, check the box, and our AI navigator will do the rest in terms of figuring out how to go ahead and log into your mobile app. And so from that standpoint, that's bucket one. AI can allow us to do things that historically we have not been able to do, because programmatically they've been difficult to, uh, write the code to make it resilient, to be redundant.

And so the best we had available was scripting. And scripting was tedious. It was laborious, it wasn't very resilient.

You made changes, it broke. So now what AI Navigator allows us to do is to get past the authentication part to test the app. And this is super important because let's just pretend the mobile app is a house.

Where do you keep all the valuables in your house? Do you keep it on the front porch outside of your door, or do you keep 'em locked up inside? You keep 'em locked up inside, inside, therefore you must, must, must test authentication, you must get passed authentication because that's where all the credit card information is.

That's where the patient record information is. At least I hope it's behind the lock to work should be well, um, yeah. And that, so it's important that you test it.

So that's, to me, category number one, which is AI is going to allow us to do things faster and cheaper than ever before. Because when we set it to a task, it's really good at achieving and figuring out that task, right? So that's one, it's an enabler.

So to me it is fantastic what we can do and we're all gonna benefit from it. Category two is what I would call AI security. And that is now, okay, AI is terrifying because now let's, I'll just use the mobile apps as an example, right?

Previously, your third party components were over collecting data, right? So that free SDK was actually making money by, in essence, exfil your data and selling it. Now, when you add AI into that mix, it's a real important threat to the company because now it's not just I'm exfil your data and selling it and you know, I'm improperly collecting geolocation on your users.

I'm now improperly collecting geolocation on your users in my AI model that I can use. So now it's just amping it up. So it's taking what was already occurring and it just increases the risk just dramatically.

Uh, and then you've gotta be able to figure out where is it in my mobile app? Did I authorize it? Did I authorize all that data?

Did something change? And so that's really kind of category two, which is AI security. And you know, now Secure has been doing that for, uh, because we have the details of what's in the app.

We've been doing that for, uh, a better part of a year now. And when we first started looking at the data of AI and mobile app, there was about 18% of mobile apps had AI in it. And most of that was actually not, uh, uh, LLMs.

Most of it was, um, uh, machine learning, uh, OCR, optical character, right? I'm gonna read something. Uh, but now we're seeing the LLMs take off.

So now the AI in a mobile app, it's up to almost 30%. And I am willing to predict, because it takes about a year or so for people to get AI through the development process. I think you're gonna see it go over 50% in 26.

And I think you're gonna see multiple AI models in a, in mobile apps. So it's not gonna be, oh, I have one model. 'cause every SDK is gonna want their version of AI in it, and the first party stuff that developer ads.

And so to me, you're about to see just a dramatic expansion, um, of AI usage and mobile. I mean, we're already seeing it, but I still think it's just the tip of the iceberg about what's what's about to come. Agreed.

I I, we are gonna hold you to that though. We'll bring you on later this year and see if we're over the 50% mark set. We'll See if my prediction holds.

That's right. All right. Yeah, I like it.

That's what we do. Good. Hey, I, Alan, if it's okay, I want to talk a little bit about, uh, you guys recently launched the now Secure AI Navigator.

Yep. Yep. Te tell us about that and maybe how we can find out more about it.

Yeah, so absolutely you can go to the Now Secure website, but you know, it makes it easy, right? As I was saying earlier in this, what we really wanna do is make security, make privacy, make data protection, make AI security, make everything about launching a mobile app that is safe, easy, and make it fast so that there's no reason that you shouldn't be doing it, right? And these are things that existing tools and methods, whether it be static source, code analysis, you know, a manual pen test, they're not easy, they're not fast, they're not complete.

And that's what we're doing. And what AI Navigator does is it uses AI to basically get to the login and navigate the app so that we have much better, deeper, more robust security testing and getting through, uh, authentication. Like I said, you don't keep your valuables on the front porch of your house, right?

You keep 'em in the house, you keep 'em behind the, the closed door. Well, sort of developers, right? That's where the best part of the app, that's where the data is that I want access, right?

That's where the systems that I want access. And again, what I really want when I'm cracking into your mobile app, I want authenticated access into your backend systems. 'cause I want access to that data.

Fair enough. You know, you mentioned the Now Secure website, but we never gave them the address, Alan. Oh, I'm sorry.

That's my my mistake. Uh, no, No, it's okay. com.

We're as easy is, you can see, you know, not, not no secure. Now make sure not, no, its now Secure Now. Make sure it's now.

com. And what's also super important, again, this whole piece of making it easy is it is included in our, uh, standard offering. Very cool.

So it's not an additional cost, it's not an additional fee. This is something that is better for everybody. And it's, it is, uh, it's fascinating to go build it and to go through to create this because we took the time to make sure that we got the security right.

Like, I'll give an example. Um, we believe in the same way that we wanna make sure that your mobile app is not, uh, leaking data. We use AI Navigator to help us do the navigation, but the customer credentials, the credentials for the app, never ever touch the AI model.

We kept the two separate so we can make sure that there's no possible way that we're gonna become a data leak for the org using ai, right? The model doesn't learn, doesn't learn, it doesn't train on it, it just does the navigation and gets us to the point where we would then, uh, the now secure software would then, uh, take charge and would, uh, add and use the credentials. So I think that's also really important, is it's not just that AI is a productivity tool.

It is safe and secure AI as a productivity tool. Love it. Alan, 15 minutes goes so quick.

We're overtime already. I wish we had more time to talk about this and maybe we can we'll have you back on. com.

Uh, check it out. Check out their AI navigator as well as a full suite of, you know, mobile security, uh, solutions. Alan, good luck with now, secure, do keep us posted and thanks for coming on.

Will do. Thank you, Alan and I, I look forward to grabbing your bagel next time. Absolute.

Come on down to Boca. Um, All right. Alan Snyder, CEO Now secure here on Tech Drug tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in a little bit.