Zimperium has highlighted the growing threat of mobile bots operating inside trusted apps, with these bots representing a new form of automation that bypasses traditional defences.

The bots in question are able of getting past trusty defences such as CAPTCHAs, rate limits and MFA, making them nearly impossible to distinguish from legitimate users and enabling fraud at scale.

Unlike web-driven bots that flood networks with suspicious traffic, mobile bots run on the client side, inside the app itself. By exploiting APIs, sessions, and app logic, they blend seamlessly with real user behaviour, leaving backend servers to interpret every action as genuine.

The result is account takeovers, loyalty abuse, and payment fraud executed from within insecure or under-protected apps that were never designed to detect them.

Mobile bots use a wide range of techniques to stay invisible and expand their reach, including:

• Emulators & Device Farms – mimic thousands of real devices at once
• Runtime Injection Tools – alter app logic in real time to bypass security checks
• Repackaged Apps – embed bot code into cloned versions of legitimate apps
• Malware on Devices – intercept app traffic and automate in-app actions
• Accessibility Abuse – programmatically tap, type, and navigate inside apps.

Each method makes bots harder to spot and easier to scale.

Mobile apps have become the front door for customer interactions: logins, bookings, payments, loyalty, and even health records. Others power critical enterprise operations.

That makes mobile bots more than a nuisance, they are a growing enterprise risk. Some run from attacker-controlled infrastructure on emulators and device farms, while others live on compromised devices, quietly performing fraudulent actions or spreading malicious links.

With more than 600 bot samples and 50+ droppers spotted in recent campaigns, the threat is accelerating.

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