APIs becoming fast-growing threat vectors

As the post-pandemic world leans heavily on digital interaction to maintain user connections, the volume of API traffic has grown rapidly. However, this growth has also brought on emerging security challenges. Organizations must regularly test Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to identify vulnerabilities, and address these vulnerabilities using security best practices. APIs may have vulnerabilities like broken authentication and authorization, lack of rate limiting, and code injection. With organizations often having hundreds or even thousands of APIs in use, the task of securing them all is highly complex.

The challenge requires a strategic approach for security assessment that can be applied universally and efficiently across a diverse set of APIs. An API attack is abusive or manipulative usage or attempted usage of an API, commonly used to breach data or manipulate a commerce solution. The growth of APIs (application programming interfaces) is more important than ever. It can lead to malicious traffic growth, consequently. APIs today prove their value by driving new digital business revenue growth and transforming decades-old business models. Such APIs have also become a fast-growing threat vector and a nexus of what research group Forrester calls “API insecurity.” What the enterprise needs is to approach APIs from a zero-trust security paradigm.

API breaches, including those at Capital One, JustDial, T-Mobile, and elsewhere, continue to underscore how perimeter-based approaches to securing web applications aren’t scaling well for today’s APIs.

APIs start with zero-trust security

Given how pervasive APIs are today, organizations need an overarching API security strategy that scales to address compliance and security challenges while keeping business outcomes in balance. Zero-trust security can address those challenges and is needed to secure APIs throughout the software development lifecycle and into production.

One example of this type of strategy is D.A.R.T., which stands for Discover, Analyze, Remediate, and Test. D.A.R.T. serves as both a lens to view security challenges, as well as a litmus test to measure the effectiveness of security efforts and solutions. This solution addresses security across the API ecosystem, from code to production, and needs to be used for each API’s unique individual requirements.

The year 2022 will be the year of the API security “arms race,” as security teams and hackers alike bring more sophisticated technologies to the playing field. Hackers are increasingly turning their attention towards APIs as an attack vector and will undoubtedly develop more advanced tools and methods for exploitation. Hackers have shown that they have and will continue to batter down the doors of companies through their insecure APIs. APIs are expanding exponentially across the technology landscape and creating a vast attack surface that enterprise security teams are struggling to understand and defend.