APIs, usually referred to as application programming interfaces, are the foundation of contemporary software applications, facilitating frictionless data interchange and communication between various platforms and systems. They give programmers a way to communicate with external services, enabling them to include different capabilities into their own programs.
However, because of their expanded use, APIs have become more desirable targets for cybercriminals. of the area of cybersecurity, the increase of API breaches has recently become a significant worry.
Inadequate security measures put in place by developers and organizations are one of the key causes of the surge in API breaches. Many APIs lack adequate security, making them susceptible to attacks.
The increase of API breaches
An API breach can have serious repercussions for both businesses and consumers. Businesses may suffer financial losses as a result of legal liabilities and reputational harm brought on by customer data breaches or service interruptions. Customers run the danger of having their private data exposed, which may result in fraud or identity theft.
These factors, along with the linked structure of contemporary software ecosystems, make guaranteeing API security crucial. Numerous businesses rely on third-party connections and microservices architecture, which allows for easy communication between numerous APIs. If even one API in this intricate network is exploited, it allows attackers access to flaws in other related systems.
Here are some explanations on why WAFs and API gateways alone are inadequate:
- Lack of fine-grained access control: API gateways can perform basic authentication and authorisation, but they might not be able to handle sophisticated cases. A lot of the time, more complex controls are needed for APIs because of things like user roles or certain resource rights.
- Inadequate defense against attacks using business logic: Traditional WAFs tend to concentrate on defending against widely used vulnerabilities like injection attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS). They might, however, fail to consider potential hazards related to business logic errors unique to an organization’s particular application workflow. A deeper comprehension of the underlying business processes and the implementation of specific security measures within the API code are necessary to defend against such attacks.
- Lack of threat intelligence: In order to successfully identify known attack behaviors, API gateways and WAFs both rely on predefined rule sets or signatures. However, until new rules are updated by vendors or manually installed by developers or administrators, emerging threats or zero-day vulnerabilities may get past these preconfigured safeguards.
- Limitations of data-level encryption: Although SSL/TLS encryption is essential for data transfer across APIs between clients and servers, it is not often sufficient to safeguard data while it is in storage within the backend systems or to ensure end-to-end encryption throughout the full data flow pipeline. Attackers can directly exploit vulnerabilities in APIs before traffic reaches the API gateway or WAF without being caught by these security measures if they discover them before it reaches the protective layers.
How businesses are handling API security
We performed our second annual poll to determine how many organizations actually comprehend the special security proposition that APIs bring. Over 600 CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, and senior security professionals from the US and UK representing six industries contributed survey data for the API Security Trends 2023 research.
Our aim was to determine the number of companies that were impacted by API-specific attacks, the manner in which they were targeted, whether or not they had made any preparations, and finally, what they had been doing in response.
The fact that 78% of cybersecurity teams claim to have experienced an API-related security incident in the last 12 months is only one of the report’s noteworthy data points.
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