Is API Security on Your Radar?

With the growth in digital transformation, the API management
market is set to grow by more than 30%^[1]
by the year 2025 as more businesses build web APIs and consumers
grow to rely on them for everything from mobile apps to customized
digital services.

As part of strategic business planning, an API helps generate
revenue by allowing customers access to the functionality of a
website or computer program through custom applications.

As more and more businesses are implementing APIs, the risk of
API attacks increases.

By 2022, Gartner predicted that API (Application Programming
Interface) attacks would become the most common attack vector for
enterprise web applications.

Cybercriminals are targeting APIs more aggressively than ever
before, and businesses must take a proactive approach to API security^[2] to combat this new
aggression.

API and The Business World

With integrating APIs into modern IT environments, businesses
are becoming increasingly data-driven.

Just as a restaurant relies on an excellent chef, and a
bandleader is a key to success, businesses increasingly depend on
API and API integrations. Half of the online traffic is generated
by users searching on companies’ publicly available APIs. All this
access is expected to grow by 37%^[3]
in 2022.

APIs can also be added to existing applications without changing
the basic foundation of the software, allowing organizations to
quickly develop and deploy a diverse combination of functionalities
to suit specific business purposes or user groups without changing
the application’s core structure.

API Fuels

• Cities with newer 5G wireless networks and older wireless
  technologies are increasingly being outfitted with high-capacity
  IoT endpoints – everything from fingerprint readers to smart street
  lamps – expanding the network’s usage opportunities.

• According to a projection^[4], more than 30.9 billion
  IoT are expected to be in use worldwide by 2025, and the number
  continues to rise every year.

Rise Of Growing API Attacks

Though enterprises are taking note of the enormous potential
behind APIs (and API releases), their number being launched and
produced is increasing at an astronomical rate. This trend has been
linked to the increasing relevance of software in today’s
world.

91% of businesses^[5]
that have implemented APIs in their business systems experienced
incidents related to breaches in security and cyber-attacks. Most
of these businesses had to deal with a major incident within the
year prior. In order to obtain full benefits of APIs, businesses
need to strike accurate and fully managed API security
solutions^[6].

So, What 3 Key Risks API Security Poses?

Misconfigured APIs: Right from misconfigured
HTTP headers, insecure default configurations to verbose error
messages, etc., the ultimate weapon of choice for
hackers is the unmanaged and unsecured API^[7]
vulnerability exploit, which can silently creep into the most
unsuspecting places.

Malware Attacks: Starts from taxing the web API
memory to send a lot of information per request, malware attacks
like DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, SQL injection,
MITM-in-the-middle attacks, or Credential stuffing to let anyone
get pass-through authentication, etc. hacked, broken or exposed
APIs are never-ending stories to extract data with ease.

Inadequate Assets Management: The older, less
secure versions of an API leave them vulnerable to attack and data
breaches. Brute-force attacks can also significantly impact an API
by exhausting all login combinations and causing the server to get
overloaded or even temporarily disabled.

3 API Security Best Practices in 2022

1 — Apply Zero Trust to API Security

With the zero-trust approach, application security teams should
empower their endpoints equally to a state of threat prevention
across all three, i.e., authentication, authorization, and threat
prevention. This will make it more difficult for hackers to breach
your online properties.

2 — Understand And Identify API Spikes or Drops Behaviors
and Interactions for Vulnerabilities

Understand and further explore API logging to ensure the
security and stability of your API.

When trying to protect your API or its users from security
issues, it’s essential to keep an eye on anything suspicious.
Security issues usually appear in abnormal behavior, which doesn’t
seem quite right. You can identify and address these threats before
they cause harm to your API or anyone using the platform.

3 — Delegate and Combine Authentication and
Authorization

Generally, API developers should implement the principle of
privilege separation. This general programming practice allows
users to access only the specific resources and methods necessary
for their role in the application.

API Monitoring is a critical part of API deployment, but it’s
also important to consider how you grant users access to your API.
Simply verifying a user’s identity isn’t sufficient; there will
likely be resources that only certain users are allowed to interact
with and specific methods they must use.

Authentication is necessary for securely verifying the user
using an API, and authorization is concerned with what data they
have access to (within a request as a token).

The Way Forward

Your web application or API is no different like a castle that
needs a defensive moat to protect the inhabitants inside its walls.
It needs protection from outside intruders and malicious agents
looking to take advantage of weaknesses; that’s where Indusface WAF^[8]
enters the picture.

With AppTrana, you get up-to-date and regular API threats review
for any anomalies or suspicious usage patterns of the OWASP Top 10
Vulnerabilities and beyond.

If you want smooth decision-making for API vulnerability
detection and protection trends, look no further than AppTrana.