Mobile Application Discovery and Attack Surface Expansion

Discovering Mobile Applications at Scale

A common challenge in Attack Surface Management is maintaining visibility into all digital assets owned by an organization. While security teams typically maintain inventories of domains, cloud infrastructure, and web applications, mobile applications are frequently overlooked.

Large enterprises often operate multiple Android and iOS applications across different brands, business units, subsidiaries, and geographic regions. As organizations grow, tracking these applications becomes increasingly difficult, creating blind spots within the attack surface.

Mobile application discovery should therefore be treated as a core asset discovery capability within every mature Attack Surface Management program.

Android Application Discovery

The Google Play Store provides a valuable source of intelligence for identifying Android applications associated with an organization.

Security teams can search for:

• Company names
• Product names
• Brand names
• Subsidiary names
• Business unit names

This process can help identify:

• Official mobile applications
• Legacy applications
• Regional variants
• Business-specific applications
• Forgotten or unmanaged assets

For large-scale automation, organizations can leverage third-party APIs such as:

Google Play Store Scraper API

https://rapidapi.com/rockapis-rockapis-default/api/google-play-store-scraper-api

By continuously monitoring search results, security teams can identify newly released applications and ensure they are incorporated into attack surface inventories.

iOS Application Discovery

The same methodology can be applied to Apple’s App Store.

Organizations can automate searches using APIs such as:

App Store API

https://rapidapi.com/epctex-epctex-default/api/app-store12

Searching for organization-specific keywords allows security teams to identify iOS applications that may otherwise remain unmanaged or unknown.

Automating Mobile Asset Discovery

Mobile asset discovery can be integrated directly into Attack Surface Management workflows.

The following prototype demonstrates how Android applications can be discovered programmatically using a keyword-based search approach.

import argparse
import requests

def send_api_request(keyword):
    url = "https://google-play-store-scraper-api.p.rapidapi.com/search-apps"

    payload = {
        "language": "en",
        "country": "us",
        "keyword": keyword
    }

    headers = {
        "content-type": "application/json",
        "X-RapidAPI-Key": "<YOUR_API_KEY>",
        "X-RapidAPI-Host": "google-play-store-scraper-api.p.rapidapi.com"
    }

    response = requests.post(url, json=payload, headers=headers)

    print(response.json())

if __name__ == "__main__":
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(
        description="Search Android applications using organization keywords."
    )

    parser.add_argument(
        "-k",
        "--keyword",
        required=True,
        help="Organization, product, or brand name"
    )

    args = parser.parse_args()

    send_api_request(args.keyword)

The resulting data can be correlated with developer information, privacy policies, support domains, and organizational ownership records to reduce false positives and improve asset attribution.

Acquiring Applications for Security Analysis

After mobile applications have been identified, the next step is acquiring application packages for assessment.

Common Android application repositories include:

• APKMirror — https://www.apkmirror.com/
• APKPure — https://apkpure.net/
• F-Droid — https://f-droid.org/en/

Organizations should always verify application signatures and package integrity before performing analysis.

Static Analysis and Attack Surface Expansion

Static analysis enables organizations to extract valuable intelligence directly from mobile applications without requiring active interaction with backend systems.

A single application can reveal significant portions of an organization’s attack surface, including:

• Mobile APIs
• Backend services
• Authentication endpoints
• Hidden subdomains
• Firebase instances
• Cloud storage references
• Internal testing environments
• Third-party integrations

Tools such as MobSF can automate static analysis and help security teams identify security weaknesses and previously undiscovered assets.

Typical Findings

During mobile application assessments, security teams frequently uncover:

• Hardcoded API keys
• Access tokens
• Cloud configuration details
• Internal URLs
• Administrative interfaces
• Debug configurations
• Sensitive application permissions
• Insecure certificate configurations

These findings often lead to the discovery of assets that are absent from traditional attack surface inventories.

By incorporating mobile application analysis into Attack Surface Management programs, organizations gain significantly greater visibility into their external and internal attack surface.