What reverse engineering exposes
Reverse engineering means decompiling and analysing an app to understand how it works and what it carries. In practice, that regularly surfaces things developers never intended to ship:
- Hardcoded secrets — API keys, credentials, certificates and tokens baked into the binary.
- Backend API endpoints — the URLs, parameters and authentication the app uses to talk to your servers.
- Hidden or debug functionality — features left in the build that were never meant to be reachable.
A single leaked key or documented internal API can hand an attacker a foothold that has nothing to do with the app itself.
From the app to your backend
Those exposed API connections are the real prize. Once an attacker understands how your app talks to your data centre, they can attack the backend directly — probing for authorization flaws, injection, and other weaknesses — often bypassing the app entirely. What looks like a mobile issue quickly becomes a server-side breach.
How Active Focus handles it
We find these apps the way an attacker would: searching the app stores for your brand, then checking the developer account behind each result for the other apps it publishes — which pulls related apps into scope too. Once we have identified a company-owned app, we reverse engineer it for exactly these exposures — secrets, backend APIs and unintended functionality. The packages themselves often reveal even more, such as new domains to add to your attack surface. We then report what an attacker could actually do with it all, with the context to fix it. Your apps stop being a blind spot and become something you can see the way an attacker does.