First-of-its-kind research by Cybernews has revealed that news apps are especially prone to leaking user's data and information.

87 per cent of magazine and newspaper apps and 77 per cent of news apps leaked hard-coded credentials, compared to an average of 71 per cent of apps across all categories. This is based on a sample of 156,080 randomly selected iOS apps – approximately 8 per cent of the App Store.

It shows that cybersecurity of mobile users is a prevalent and ongoing challenge for many industries developing mobile app technology. But news apps perform worse than most.

News apps commonly exposed database details, cloud storage information, and Google and Facebook authentication tokens.

"Usually such issues are the result of inexperienced or uneducated developers, not realising that hard-coded credentials can be easily accessed by third parties," explains Aras Nazarovas, security researcher at Cybernews, in an email to Journalism.co.uk. He added that the deviation between the failings of the average app and news apps was "not that extreme".

The research suggests two areas of improvement: educating developers........

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