The IT Nerd

A new partnership between Edinburgh Napier University and mobile cybersecurity firm Approov Limited will aim to improve smartphone security.

The Edinburgh-based company has agreed a Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with ENU, which will include the recruitment of two cyber security researchers, co-funded by Innovate UK.

Over the course of 30 months, Approov and Edinburgh Napier will work together to create innovative defence mechanisms and an offensive test bed – known in cyber security as ‘blue team’ and ‘red team’. 

The project, which received the highest rating in Innovate UK’s assessment for this funding round, will involve the ENU-hosted Scottish Centre of Excellence in Digital Trust and Distributed Ledger Technology.

It builds on Edinburgh Napier’s strong record in cyber security and digital trust technology. It has been recognised by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) as an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education (ACE-CSE) – and was the starting point for several successful cybersecurity spin out companies.

Background:

Edinburg Napier holds early accreditation from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is recognized as a leader in cyber skills and training. It’s globally ranked in Computer Science and Electrical and Electronic Engineering by U.S. News & World Report, and the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) ranked Edinburgh Napier as the top modern university in Scotland for both research power and research impact, with nearly 70% of evaluated research deemed world-leading or internationally excellent.

As AI-powered agents become increasingly capable of adapting their behavior in real time, many current tactics used by app publishers and developers to defend mobile applications and APIs are becoming less effective or obsolete.

The OWASP Los Angeles chapter will bring cybersecurity and technology professionals together September 23, 2026, for an in-person examination of how organizations can secure their most popular connection to customers – their mobile apps – against increasingly sophisticated attacks and AI-driven automation.

Sponsored by Approov Limited, the meetup will feature Mark Mazur, Field CTO at Approov, presenting “How to Build Secure Mobile Apps in the Age of AI Agentics and API Attacks.” The event will take place from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. PDT at 929 Colorado Ave. in Santa Monica, California.

AI agentic threats have raised the stakes for API security

Until recently, automated attacks typically ran on rigid scripts and depended on predictable behavior. AI-agentic attackers introduce a different challenge: the exploit’s ability to dynamically adapt their tactics without human oversight as they encounter defenses, and change how they interact with an application or API attack sequence. This autonomous evolution is referred to as a recursive self-improvement (RSI) attack.

These RSI attacks increase an organization’s susceptibility to data scraping, credential stuffing, inventory hoarding , and the discovery and exploitation of business logic vulnerabilities.

Moreover, as RSI threats mimic and become more indistinguishable from legitimate users, the effectiveness of behavioral detection defenses is declining.

Mazur said: “The fundamental security question is shifting from simply asking whether traffic looks human to establishing whether the application making the request can be trusted. AI-driven automation is making behavioral defenses increasingly difficult to rely on by themselves. Too many organizations are still relying on tactics that worked against circa 2025 threats.”

Mazur will also share defenses such as cryptographic proof of authenticity and application-level trust in defending mobile apps and APIs against sophisticated automated abuse.

He has more than 20 years of experience architecting and scaling enterprise, mobile, web, AI and server software across cybersecurity, fintech, ad-tech, messaging and gaming.

Event Details

This OWASP LA event is intended for cybersecurity professionals, software developers, architects, technology leaders and others invested in securing mobile applications and APIs.

Event: OWASP Los Angeles September In-Person Meetup
Topic: How to Build Secure Mobile Apps in the Age of AI Agentics and API Attacks
Speaker: Mark Mazur, Field CTO, Approov Limited
Sponsor: Approov Limited
Date: Wednesday, September 23, 2026
Time: 5:30–8:30 p.m. PDT
Location: 929 Colorado Ave., Santa Monica, CA

Registration: Attendees must register in advance by visiting: https://luma.com/ik2qe9ji

Approov Limited will participate as a Gold Sponsor of Cloudflare Connect 2026, the company announced today. The conference runs Oct. 19-21, 2026, at Moscone West in San Francisco. Approov will be on site all three days, including the Global Partner Summit on Oct. 19.

Approov and Cloudflare have partnered since 2024 to close a gap that web-focused defenses were never built to address: traffic that originates from mobile applications. Cloudflare Bot Management and API Shield inspect and score traffic at the edge. Approov adds cryptographic proof of what is calling the API, verifying that a request comes from a genuine, untampered instance of the customer’s own app running on an uncompromised device. Requests that cannot prove their provenance never reach the origin.

That distinction has become more consequential as agentic AI systems mature. Automated agents can navigate interfaces, solve challenges, replay credentials and generate traffic that is behaviorally indistinguishable from a person using a phone. Heuristic and behavioral scoring degrades against an adversary that can imitate behavior on demand. Attestation does not. An agent operating outside the genuine app cannot produce a valid Approov token, however convincingly it mimics human interaction.

Approov is also a Cloudflare customer. The Approov attestation service runs on Cloudflare’s global network and uses Argo Smart Routing to cut latency on attestation traffic, a material requirement because every protected API call waits on a verification decision returning inside the time budget of a mobile app. Building the service on the same network its customers already run on means protection is enforced close to the user rather than in a distant round trip.

The partnership was extended in 2026 and now runs through 2028, giving joint customers a multiyear commitment behind the integration and giving both engineering teams a stable horizon for continued work on message signing and enriched mobile threat telemetry. Visit approov.io/approov-cloudflare-partnership to learn more about the partnership.

Attendees can find Approov in the sponsor hub throughout Connect 2026. Book a time with the Approov team at the event.

Approov today announced the appointment of Rex S. Jackson as independent Chairman of its Board of Directors. Mr. Jackson succeeds Dr. Lucio Lanza, who has been recognized for his years of leadership and who will continue to serve on the Board as a non-executive director.

Mr. Jackson brings more than three decades of executive and board leadership in Silicon Valley technology companies. He has served as Chief Financial Officer and General Counsel across multiple public and private technology companies, most recently as CFO helping lead ChargePoint through its merger and public listing. He currently serves on the board of Terra Innovatum (Nasdaq: NKLR), where he chairs the audit committee and serves on the compensation committees. Mr. Jackson holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School and a B.A. from Duke University.

The company also paid tribute to Dr. Lanza’s tenure. A legendary figure in semiconductor and electronic design automation investing, Dr. Lanza backed Approov’s vision early and has chaired its Board through years of sustained growth, championing the company’s pioneering work in cloud-based cryptographic mobile app attestation.

The appointment was approved unanimously by Approov’s Board and shareholders, including investors Maven Capital Partners, Lanza Tech Ventures and Scottish Enterprise.

Attackers are no longer writing bots by hand. Agentic AI systems can now probe mobile APIs, mimic legitimate app behavior, and adapt to defenses in real time – at a scale no human-operated botnet could match. Today Approov, the leader in mobile app and API security, announced Approov 2026 3.6, a major global attestation platform upgrade built to meet that threat head-on, combining expanded global infrastructure with the deep, real-time visibility enterprise security teams need to detect and shut down AI-driven attacks as they happen.

The release arrives as Approov processes record attestation volumes for organizations whose mobile apps handle their customers’ most sensitive data – banks, healthcare providers, retailers, and automakers – billions of verifications confirming that every API request comes from a genuine, untampered app on a safe device. Agentic AI attacks rarely run inside the real mobile app; instead, they impersonate it, replaying its API traffic from scripts, emulators and server farms while masquerading as genuine mobile devices. Attestation cuts through that disguise by requiring each request to prove it originates from the authentic app on a real device – proof that a spoofed client running in a data center cannot supply.

New Global Infrastructure for Ultra-Low Latency

Approov has deployed new regional attestation infrastructure in Mexico, with a Milan region following shortly, expanding a global network that already spans North America, South America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. The new regions cut response times for users across Central America, the southern United States, Southern Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. The Approov attestation network runs across multiple independent cloud providers with automatic failover, using intelligent traffic routing to minimize latency worldwide. As attestation volumes surge, the expanded edge network keeps security checks invisible to legitimate users – protection without friction.

Real-Time Threat Intelligence, Straight into the SOC

Approov turns every protected API into a sensor for AI-driven attack activity, unlocking advanced logging and security use cases:

• Direct SIEM integration. Backend systems can now decode Approov’s device and app threat signals locally – no extra round trip to Approov servers – and pass detection results directly into Splunk, Sentinel or any SIEM correlated with other request data.
• Forgery detection. Message Signatures on each network request ensure the origin of the request data verified with a cryptographic key from the device.  Additional key and secret visibility allow verification of attestation ‘pass’ JWT tokens,validly signed ‘fail’ JWT tokens, and invalid or attacker-signed forged tokens – a critical signal when AI agents attempt to counterfeit credentials at scale.
• Hands-off secret rotation. Setup automated retrieval and deployment of the secrets and keys that backend systems require to secure your mobile APIs, enabling fully automated secret rotation with no manual intervention and no maintenance window.

Deploy New Defenses Without Risking Real Users

Responding to a new attack pattern has always carried a hidden cost: a security policy that blocks attackers can also lock out legitimate customers. Approov 2026 replaces all-or-nothing policy updates with gradual rollouts. Security teams can deploy a new defense to a small slice of traffic, watch its real-world impact live, and expand with confidence – making it safe to respond aggressively to fast-moving AI threats.

Early Warning Before Incidents Escalate

An updated monitoring and alerting suite give both customers and Approov’s own engineers advance notice of trouble:

• Customer-configurable alerts flag unusual spikes in failed verifications – whether caused by an emerging attack or a third-party network anomaly – so teams can act before failover systems are needed.
• Global anomaly detection watches pass/fail patterns across Approov’s entire customer base. If multiple accounts show simultaneous failures, Approov’s on-call engineers are paged automatically, turning isolated signals into ecosystem-wide early warning.

Looking Ahead: HarmonyOS Readiness

The release also activates backend support for Huawei’s HarmonyOS platform, now in internal validation, positioning Approov to deliver enterprise-grade protection ahead of the platform’s full market expansion.

Availability

The Approov 2026 backend upgrade is rolling out automatically to all enterprise customers. Documentation for the new SIEM integration, gradual rollout, and automated secret rotation capabilities is available in the updated Approov CLI documentation. For more information, visit approov.com.

Approov’s network monitoring and analysis has found that the World Cup will be the first major proving ground for AI-driven betting fraud, combining record-breaking volumes with high-speed AI tools.

Findings have just been published in “AI Scraping for Manipulation Makes Sports Betting Unfair – The World Cup is the Immediate Test, The LA28 Olympics are a Next Level.”

Indicators of upcoming activity were observed on the Approov Global Attestation Network.  For sportsbooks, this creates two problems that don’t get better with time:

• Market distortion: Automated actors can move faster than human bettors, particularly in live‑in‑play and micro‑markets (such as first-scorer, goal/point totals, or player-specific props), which are expected to dominate World Cup betting.
• Perception of unfairness: If regular users believe that bots and AI systems are always one step ahead, the sense of a “level playing field” collapses.

The analysis discusses a new generation of organized, AI-driven bad actors looking to fleece both bettors and betting platforms, with well‑resourced scrapers, arbitrageurs, and betting syndicates treating the World Cup as a high‑margin, high‑velocity data opportunity. It’s also a test lab for exploitation of other high-speed markets, real-time pricing-sensitive transactions, behavioral manipulation, API exploitation and consumer trust engineering.

Why does it all matter? Because when users believe that humans can’t compete, systems collapse.

More details here: https://approov.io/blog/threat-analysis-ai-scraping-for-manipulation-makes-sports-betting-unfair

When a smartphone’s AI agent can execute actions across apps, read messages, interpret meaning, pull data from various apps and act autonomously outside of the user’s knowledge or intent, outcomes can potentially go sideways very quickly.

For the last 15 years, smartphones have responded to their users’ commands. Now, Android 17 threatens this user interaction model and its inherent safety guardrails.

Agentic mobile’s risks are explained in “Android 17: Your Phone’s AI is Evolving to be More Autonomous,” new analysis by Approov Senior Manager Joyce Kuo.  The full analysis is embedded at bottom.

Here’s the upshot:

Android 17 represents a major step towards moving toward the agentic mobile model, in which a device can coordinate tasks across apps as a personal agent. The upside is convenience. The downside is a new class of risk where nothing is technically compromised, but the result is unpredictable and potentially quite wrong. Data may be exposed, actions may be triggered, and workflows may be executed based on manipulated or misunderstood context.

Kuo looks at this expansion of the mobile attack surface beyond traditional app boundaries and user interaction norms, and why existing protections like sandboxing and permissions won’t address this new layer of risk.

Android 17 represents more than just a UX update; it’s a fundamental security and architecture shift – for brands on mobile, for their developers, and for users.

The core issues are straightforward: when systems start acting on your behalf, potentially without the user’s knowledge, how do you as a smartphone-using consumer prevent them from doing exactly what they may otherwise be allowed to do at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons? And how to brands and other app publishers (and their developers) contain these risks?

Approov today announced the official opening of its new headquarters in Edinburgh’s New Town. The move marks a significant milestone for the company following a defining year characterised by major investment, strategic partnerships, and a rapidly expanding global customer base.

The relocation to one of Edinburgh’s most iconic areas is a direct response to the company’s accelerated growth trajectory in 2025. Propelled by a recent investment round led by Maven Capital Partners, the new facility provides the necessary infrastructure to scale Approov’s technology and accommodate a growing workforce across engineering, product, sales, and customer success.

Heading into 2026, Approov plans to utilise the new space to accelerate innovation in mobile app and API security, expand its global partner ecosystem, and enhance threat-intelligence capabilities.

Approov today announced significant strategic expansion of its global network infrastructure, positioning its unique cloud-based mobile app and device attestation platform as the essential defense against rapidly evolving AI-based API threats. This expansion includes the deployment of Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing technology across its multi-cloud network, which is supported by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

Approov’s architecture represents a major shift in mobile security, moving away from conventional, on-device approaches like Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) and code obfuscation that are increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated hacking tools and AI-driven reverse engineering.

The Next Generation of Mobile Security: Cloud-Based Attestation

The core of Approov’s next-generation platform is its approach to security-by-design: moving all sensitive secrets, such as API keys, out of the mobile application and into a secure, cloud-based enclave. Security is then managed through a rigorous, real-time app and device attestation process performed entirely in the cloud.

Approov’s cloud platform verifies that all API requests originate from a genuine, untampered mobile app running on a secure device. This model drastically reduces API attacks from bots, scripts, and cloned apps by over 95%, creating a safer digital ecosystem for major organizations in finance, retail, healthcare, and connected cars.

High Performance for a Mission-Critical Platform

To ensure this mission-critical security is delivered without compromising the user experience, Approov recognizes the absolute need for a high-performance, robust, and resilient network infrastructure. The platform must deliver attestation tokens over an encrypted channel with the lowest possible latency, regardless of a mobile app’s operating location.

To meet this demand, Approov has made two key infrastructure enhancements:

1.    Cloudflare Argo Smart Routing Integration: Approov has integrated Cloudflare’s Argo Smart Routing™ across its network. This technology continuously optimizes the routing of attestation traffic by dynamically selecting the fastest and most reliable network paths. By enabling Argo Smart Routing, Approov reduces Internet latency on average by more than 30% and connection errors by 27%, significantly enhancing performance for end-users globally. The integration also includes Cloudflare’s enterprise-level Layer 4/7 Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) protection.

2.    Expanded Global Attestation Fabric: Approov continues to grow its multi-region, multi-cloud fabric with new points of presence in U.S. East, Hong Kong, and Taipei, Taiwan, complementing existing locations in Dublin, U.S. West (San Jose), Sao Paulo, and Singapore. The multi-cloud deployment on AWS and Google Cloud is designed with automatic cross-cloud failover for maximum resiliency under the most extreme threats.

These strategic investments ensure that Approov will continue to deliver the fastest, most efficient, and most secure mobile app protection, allowing enterprises to fully trust the source of every mobile API request.

Approov has announced that it’s been shortlisted as a finalist for the Cyber Innovation Award at the 2025 Scottish Cyber Awards, sponsored by SC3. This prestigious recognition highlights Approov’s groundbreaking work in mobile security, alongside esteemed finalists Lloyds Banking Group, Morgan Stanley, TrueDeploy, and PACE Anti-Piracy Europe Ltd.

The Scottish Cyber Awards celebrate outstanding contributions to cybersecurity, showcasing organizations that drive innovation and resilience in digital security. Approov’s selection as a finalist underscores its pioneering app attestation technology, which safeguards mobile applications and their backend APIs from emerging cyber threats.

A Revolutionary Approach to Mobile Security

Approov’s innovation directly addresses the growing risks of API abuse, mobile app tampering, and data breaches. With its patented client software attestation technology (U.S. Patent 11,163,858 B2), Approov ensures that only legitimate, untampered mobile applications can interact with critical backend systems. This cloud-based attestation solution provides seamless security across Android, iOS, and HarmonyOS applications, making it a trusted choice for industries such as fintech, healthcare, automotive, and e-commerce.

Standing Out in the Cybersecurity Landscape

Approov’s nomination stems from its proven impact in reducing fraud, preventing unauthorized API access, and helping businesses comply with evolving data security regulations like the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) and UK Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC). By tackling API security vulnerabilities that traditional platform-native solutions fail to address, Approov offers organizations a future-proof defense against sophisticated cyber threats.

The winners of the 2025 Scottish Cyber Awards will be revealed at a gala ceremony in Edinburgh on March 27, 2025. Approov congratulates all fellow finalists and looks forward to celebrating cybersecurity excellence in Scotland.

For more information about the Awards, visit 2025 Scottish Cyber Awards.