Marble Security Seeks Mobile Intelligence Partners

With pricing for mobile device and application management under pressure, many solution providers are starting to look for other ways to add value around mobile computing. The most logical place to do that involves mobile security.

At the RSA 2015 conference next week, Marble Security will be recruiting partners to resell AppHawk, a mobile threat intelligence and defense service for Apple iOS and Google Android applications and devices launched this week.

Marble Security CEO and CTO Dave Jevans said partners that resell the AppHawk service receive as much as a 35 percent to 45 percent discount along with access to various SPIF programs. Jevans said there are now roughly 3 million applications on mobile devices that are largely unprotected. While there is no shortage of anti-malware software for mobile computing devices, Jevans said the scope of threat goes beyond simple viruses. Criminal organizations have created a bevy of sophisticated spearfishing attacks that are now aimed at specific types of mobile applications and even individual users. What appears to be a legitimate update to a mobile application instead is a piece of malware embedded inside an application that is designed to mimic the behavior of a legitimate mobile computing application.

AppHawk is designed to enable IT organizations to both identify these threats and remediate the problem by sending an alert to the organization that uses the AppHawk service and, if necessary, quarantining that application on the mobile device.

The AppHawk service can analyze more than 3.5 million applications created by a half-million publishers. Each application is scored against more than 1,000 malicious and privacy-leaking behaviors to determine whether it's dangerous or safe.

In general, Marble Security estimates that an average enterprise with 2,000 users of mobile applications will be exposed to 20,000 unique apps from thousands of publishers. Those applications will wind up communicating with servers in more than 40 different countries.

Jevans said Marble Security is looking specifically for partners that have expertise in selling mobile device management (MDM) software. As part of that effort Marble Security announced it has recruited PaRaBaL, a mobile solutions provider based in Baltimore into its channel program.

The explosion of mobile computing is clearly creating a sizeable after market opportunity for solution providers. The challenge many solution providers are trying to rise to is finding a profitable way to deliver value-added services even though they themselves may not have even sold the device or even the network services they rely on, in the first place.