APIs are the backbone of modern software, powering everything from mobile apps to complex enterprise systems. As businesses rely on more APIs to connect services and streamline operations, they also expand their attack surface, giving cybercriminals more opportunities to exploit weaknesses. From broken authentication to excessive data exposure, API vulnerabilities can result in data breaches, regulatory issues, and operational disruption.
To keep pace with this growing risk, organizations must treat API security as a core part of their threat detection and incident response strategy, not an afterthought.
What are Some Common API Vulnerabilities?
As with any technology, APIs can have design, implementation, or usage weaknesses that give cybercriminals a way to gain unauthorized access to sensitive systems, networks, applications, and data. The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) updated its API Security Top Ten list in 2023, defining these critical API vulnerabilities:
- Broken object-level authorization: Lack of object-level authorization checks
- Broken authentication: failure to provide API property authentication mechanisms
- Broken object property level authorization: failure to validate user access
- Unrestricted resource consumption: lack of limits on requests that require resource use
- Broken Function Level Authorization: inability to manage complex authorization hierarchies
- Unrestricted Access to Sensitive Business Flows: exposing resources and workflows after abuse of excessively automated business logic.
- Server-Side Request Forgery: failure to validate the user-supplied URI
- Security misconfiguration: failure to limit functionalities or mitigate vulnerabilities
- Improper inventory management: lack of up-to-date asset inventory
- Unsafe consumption of APIs: Relying on vendor-provided, weaker security requirements
Check out our Cybersecurity Glossary for definitions of common vulnerabilities.
Why is API Threat Detection Important?
As attackers increasingly target APIs, identifying abnormal activity as quickly as possible can reduce data breach risks and limit operational disruptions. Some key benefits of API threat detection include:
- Protecting sensitive data: identifying potential data theft by understanding transaction flows
- Maintaining system integrity: identifying emerging threats with automation can ensure consistent application of security measures
- Enhancing user trust: monitoring for abnormal login behavior fosters user confidence in data protection
- Improved compliance posture: documenting APIs and monitoring security reduces the likelihood of compliance violations
What Are Real-time API Monitoring Techniques?
Real-time API monitoring improves threat detection, incident response times, and overall visibility to aid organizations as they work to secure data and achieve compliance goals.
Traffic Analysis
Continuously tracking API traffic improves security threat detection by providing insight into how APIs communicate across the network. By monitoring traffic, security teams can look for patterns over time that help identify subtle attacks that could otherwise evade detection.
Anomaly Detection
Anomaly detection leverages machine learning and rule-based analytics to reveal abnormal activity, like traffic spikes. With API observability tools, organizations can gain visibility into all their APIs for faster vulnerability identification and improved threat detection.
Behavior Analytics
Behavioral analytics monitors API usage patterns to detect unusual activity. Visualizing user behavior enables security teams to uncover fraud and abuse by revealing unusual API usage patterns, ultimately improving threat detections.
What Are Some Automated Response Mechanisms?
Automated response mechanisms are security controls that act instantly to mitigate issues like unexpected API calls or unwanted configuration changes. Some automated response mechanisms include:
- Rate-limiting: setting a cap on the number of requests allowed during a given time to mitigate denial-of-service (DoS) attack risks, where cybercriminals flood an API with requests so that it becomes unresponsive, leading to business interruption
- IP allow/block lists: automatically blocking bad requests from detected malicious IP addresses enables quick response against suspicious captivity, making it a critical part of a multi-layered API detection and response strategy
- Bot protection: detecting and preventing malicious bot activity that targets vulnerable and securely coded APIs to prevent fraud
How to Implement API Threat Detection and Response
Combining API security measures with broader security platforms creates a strong multi-layered defense that enhances threat detection and reduces incident response times.
Identify All APIs
You can’t protect APIs you don’t know about. The first step to incorporating APIs into your threat detection and incident response capabilities is to identify all external-facing and internal APIs. Often, organizations have managed and unmanaged APIs, typically arising from a lack of documentation. To identify all APIs across the environment, you should implement a runtime API security solution that can identify and analyze:
- Published, shadowed, and deprecated APIs
- Traffic patterns to understand usage
- API specifications
- Headers, parameters, and response codes.
- Interaction with regulated data
Deploy a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Web Application Firewalls are still a strong, traditional way of protecting web applications. At a high level, WAF filters and blocks malicious API requests to mitigate denial of service risks. Additionally, a WAF can help mitigate risks by:
- Scanning for OWASP API vulnerabilities
- Profiling traffic to define positive traffic models and
- Allowing or blocking traffic
- Creating environment-specific rules
Identify and Remediate Vulnerabilities
While you can proactively detect some API vulnerabilities with secure coding tools, you need to monitor for issues that arise after the API implementation. Runtime visibility and monitoring enable you to identify and remediate vulnerabilities like:
- Business logic flaws that attackers could use to manipulate how the endpoints behave
- Changes that externalize APIs originally intended for internal use only
- Vendor APIs with security weaknesses
Incorporate Threat Intelligence
Threat intelligence provides insight into attacks happening in the real world. With insight into how cybercriminals target APIs, organizations can build high-fidelity alerts to detect potential incidents faster.
Leverage Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Using ML and AI-driven monitoring solutions enables you to define baselines of normal traffic and create customizable security policies to align with business needs and compliance requirements. With these analytics, you can:
- Detect abnormal user and application behaviors, potentially signaling an account takeover
- Identify stealthy bots by examining detailed traffic behaviors
- Adapt to new threat by using telemetry
- Mitigate an attack’s impact with behavioral analysis and fingerprint recognition
Vercara WAAP: Integrated API Security to Improve Threat Detection and Response
Vercara’s WAAP solutions deliver comprehensive protection from dynamic threats, blocking a high volume of malicious traffic and requests. Our WAF solution defends critical applications, including those with complex workflows, against common threats targeting the application layer, such as SQL injection, XSS, and CSRF. By employing positive and negative security capabilities, Vercara’s solution enables you to detect zero-day threats and those featuring malformed packets or non-RFC-compliant traffic.
Augmenting the WAF, our unified API security platform discovers and secures APIs across your network, protecting you against malicious bots and fraudulent activity. Our API security solution delivers real-time runtime visibility into, testing for, and monitoring over APIs so you can remediate errors quickly and conform to security and regulatory requirements.
Vercara’s WAAP detects and defends against malicious bots, effectively countering sophisticated bot attacks and business logic abuse.
To learn how Vercara enables your organization, contact us today.
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