Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are one of the most fundamental technologies of the digital age, allowing for connections between two different applications. Every time you receive an update on a mobile device, log in to an online service, or even use a map application to drive to work, you’re interacting with APIs the entire time.
Considering how essential APIs are to the functioning of modern applications, API security should be a top priority for businesses. Especially as they allow applications to exchange information, hackers will focus their attention on them due to the valuable data that they may have access to.
In this article, we’ll discuss why API security is so important, touch on some leading cybersecurity defense strategies for APIs, and demonstrate how your business can achieve a comprehensive level of API protection.
APIs Face Automated Attacks
Due to how instrumental APIs are, they’re often the target of cyberattacks. If a hacker is able to gain access to an API, they could then gain access to any confidential or sensitive data that passes across the API pathway. Equally, they could leverage their access to the API to further infiltrate into your systems, resulting in a widespread data breach and severe reputational damages for your company.
One particular strategy that hackers leverage to put pressure on APIs is automated attacks. Groups can use large quantities of bots to execute complex and persistent attacks on APIs. Here are a few of the most common automated API attacks:
- Credential Stuffing: This form of API attack uses a large number of botted devices. These bots will all attempt to log into a user’s account or into a software system by systematically trying out different usernames and passwords. With thousands of bots trying thousands of combinations every minute, this can quickly turn into an effective way of brute-forcing into an API pathway.
- DoS Attacks: Denial of Service attacks are where thousands of bot devices rapidly solicit data from your API or interact with it, causing it to have to manage thousands of requests concurrently. The scale of resource demand that these bots place on the API is too much for it to handle, meaning that it runs out of resources and stops functioning.
- Vulnerability Scanning: Vulnerability scanner bots will interact with your API and search for potential vulnerabilities that a hacker could then leverage to exploit your system. These monitoring bots can gather a huge amount of data on your API’s security if left unchecked.
Without effective protection in place, your business is unable to identify when any of these attacks are occurring. Without full visibility over your API security, you may give malicious actors the time and resources they need to breach into your systems.
Implementing Rate Limiting and Throttling
With the vast majority of API cyber threats stemming from bot traffic or malicious networks of bots, it’s a good idea for businesses to implement cyber defense strategies that directly protect against this threat. Recent data suggests that nearly 60% of businesses are worried about data exfiltration from API security events, making taking defensive measures as quickly as possible a good course of action.
Two of the leading strategies that cybersecurity solution providers will offer when attempting to keep APIs safe are:
- Rate Limiting: Rate limiting is an API management strategy that imposes limits on all of the connections to your APIs. Instead of having an unlimited number of connections and interactions that a device could make, everything will have a limit. Have you ever entered your password incorrectly a few times in a row and had to wait a few minutes to try again? This is a form of rate limiting in action, helping to prevent credential stuffing in your organization.
- Throttling: Throttling is another method of controlling your API and managing requests, but one that focuses more on the requests themselves than the device’s connection. Throttling will measure the API’s performance and then adjust the number of connections that are allowed at any one time. Throttling ensures that APIs never reach 100% resource consumption by limiting the number of connections based on current performance.
These strategies can form the cornerstone of API protection, acting as a direct method of fighting back against the automated threats that are so commonly leveraged against APIs. With rate limiting and throttling, your business will be able to protect against DoS attacks, credential stuffing, and other malicious bot traffic.
More Comprehensive API Protection
APIs are necessary in every application to facilitate the exchange of information. As fundamental application data infrastructure, APIs won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. With that in mind, it’s vital that your business obtains the best possible level of API protection, as this will serve to not only keep your applications safe but also protect your business from any further breaches that can stem from API security events.
Where possible, organizations should look for comprehensive API protection from leading cybersecurity companies. By enlisting support from cybersecurity providers, you can find an API protection solution that keeps your business safe from harm. As APIs do the heavy lifting in your applications, your company should go that extra mile to create layers of comprehensive security to ensure their security.
