Almost a year ago, Gartner predicted that API attacks would be the most frequent enterprise attack vector in 2022. Strengthening API security is more critical today than ever and must be at the core of cybersecurity strategy to prevent API exploitation.

To make matters worse, the lack of API visibility weakens core security principles. More organizations don’t have an accurate inventory of APIs, and it is not surprising for 30% of APIs to be unknown.

How do you solve the security vulnerabilities, risks, and complexities that the increasing adoption of APIs has brought to your enterprise?

Why Prevent API Exploitation?

The Impact of API Attacks

API attacks are damaging reputationally and financially, attracting astronomical escalation costs, legal charges, fines, penalties for non-compliance, loss of trust, and customer attrition. By preventing API exploitation, organizations can avoid the extraordinary losses that API attacks cause.

Why Attackers Love Them?

Exponential Growth in Usage and Complexities: APIs have seen exponential growth within organizations, increasing API complexity. How so?

• Diverse security needs and complexity in managing API security
• Inconsistencies, integration issues, and implementation flaws associated with shifting to the cloud and moving away from monolithic apps to API-first apps and microservices
• Widespread use of third-party apps and APIs and their security implications
• Lack of centralized API visibility
• Lack of ownership and control

In the face of these complexities, security risks are constantly increasing.

Access to Data: APIs directly access sensitive information, business, and critical resources. By breaching API security, attackers can seamlessly gain access to these data, stealing, modifying, or deleting records. Attackers can essentially exfiltrate company secrets, intellectual property, proprietary knowledge, etc., that are not publicly available.

Easy to Disrupt Business Processes: Attackers can also make functionalities unavailable to legitimate users by flooding APIs with voluminous requests, exploiting vulnerabilities, or disrupting the flow of information between programs.

Widening Attack Surface: They widen the attack surface due to their nature. APIs make up nearly 90% of the attack surface of web apps and have become the primary attack vectors today.

Easy to Bypass Security Measures: API vulnerabilities and security weaknesses are unique, and so are the security risks. Organizations often rely on security solutions, scanners built for web apps, or outdated firewall solutions to detect and secure API vulnerabilities. Such solutions cannot detect unique vulnerabilities and gaps in APIs. So, attackers can effortlessly exploit APIs by bypassing security measures.

Preventing API Exploitation: Ways to Manage Attacks, Vulnerabilities, and Complexities

1. Maintain an Updated API Inventory

This is an important step in effective API management and prevention of API exploitation. How can you manage APIs and protect them unless you know all the APIs you use in your organization? By updating the API inventory, you know your attack surface and the areas to crawl to find vulnerabilities.

2. Understand the Potential Risks

Always choose a risk-based approach to API security as it pre-empts uncertainties and identifies risks specific to the organization. It focuses on identifying threats, vulnerabilities, and risks facing the organization, prioritizing them, and allocating resources and efforts for mitigation.

3. Proactively Identify Vulnerabilities in APIs

Leverage dynamic, automated API scanning tools augmented by human expertise to proactively identify API vulnerabilities. In addition, the tool must be equipped to unearth shadow APIs and showcase the protection status of APIs. This helps mitigate API security gaps before hackers can identify and exploit them.

4. Real-Time Threat Detection is Key

As per the risk-based approach, you need to know the threats facing your APIs in real-time to manage risks effectively. Therefore, real-time API threat detection is critical. To this end, behavioral analysis, pattern, and heuristic analysis, fingerprinting, workflow validation, and global threat feeds must be leveraged to detect sophisticated DDoS, malware, and bot attacks.

5. Ensure Accurate, End-to-End Protection

Accurate, end-to-end API protection is equally important. To this end, you should choose a fully managed API protection solution like AppTrana that combines positive and negative security models to detect and protect against all kinds of API threats and abuses. The solution should offer customized security policies suited to the needs of your business but also provide API-specific security policies. The solution must be scalable, offer real-time alerts and complete visibility, and assure zero false positives.

In addition, take these steps to prevent API exploitation:

• Implement stringent authorization and access control policies
• Enforce strong authentication and password policies
• Encrypt everything
• Sanitize and validate user inputs

6. Don’t Miss API Monitoring and Logging

API logging and monitoring help you construct the baseline for normal variance. And doing so continuously will ensure that your definitions of normal variance keep evolving with your risks.

Conclusion 

APIs are the foundation for building modern-day SaaS, web, and mobile apps. This makes the prevention of API exploitation critical for business continuity. Start securing your APIs now!

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