The Importance of API Posture Management
APIs enable seamless communication and data exchange between software, transforming how developers build and deploy applications. However, APIs are also a useful entry point for hackers, providing new opportunities to disrupt services or gain unauthorized access to sensitive business data.
This could be due to poor design with bugs or vulnerabilities in the code or poor API governance and management, such as failing to implement proper authentication or security misconfigurations and unprotected endpoints.
Additionally, many APIs are designed to be used by external services or be accessible through the public internet. This inherently opens them up to more significant manipulation by bad actors, who have a new surface to attack when trying to infiltrate enterprise IT systems.
APIs create new application security challenges and are becoming prime targets for cybercriminals. API attacks have increased dramatically in recent years. Research shows that 1 in 4.6 organizations were impacted by web API attacks each week during January 2024. An increase of 20% compared to January 2023.
These attacks can lead to data breaches, service disruptions, reputational damage, financial losses, and potentially the end of your business.
To protect against these outcomes and manage the risks associated with APIs, businesses need proper security strategies in place. This is why API posture management is so important. It provides the management structures to oversee your entire API security approach, governing how to protect your business from API attacks and minimize the risks.
API Posture Management Processes
While API posture management varies between organizations and their specific needs, some processes are common across approaches. These include:
#1. API Identification
Providing comprehensive visibility of your API landscape by identifying all of the APIs in use. By documenting the entire ecosystem, you can identify and visualize end-to-end API flows, spotting potential vulnerabilities or malicious activity. This process includes flagging:
- Shadow APIs that were previously unknown and undocumented but are in use.
- Zombie APIs that are unused and dormant but are still operational and represent potential vulnerabilities.
- Orphaned APIs that are no longer requested in an application.
#2. API Risk Assessment
Once you have the complete picture, you can start organizing APIs and classifying them based on the risk they pose. API risk assessments should consider their access level to sensitive datasets and whether they are exposed to the public internet. Understanding the most exposed and sensitive APIs allows you to prioritize your security measures accordingly.
#3. API Security Controls and Tools
Organizations typically implement security controls using API security tools and solutions based on the findings from the risk assessment. Identified vulnerabilities and compliance issues should be remediated before they can be exploited, and protections should be put in place. Typical preventative methods to implement include:
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- Authentication: Ensuring only approved users and systems have access.
- Authorization: Enforcing policies related to what different users and systems can request.
- Encryption: Protecting data from unauthorized access.
#4. API Testing
Your security controls require testing to ensure they minimize risk and cover your entire API ecosystem. In particular, focus on APIs with higher risk assessments to ensure attackers cannot manipulate requests to expose sensitive data or disrupt services. Regular scans of your infrastructure and API configurations also help detect new vulnerabilities and misconfigurations caused by drift.
#5. API Monitoring
Tracking API calls allows you to identify suspicious activity and anomalies that may be indicative of cyberattacks. This includes tracing requests to their users and systems and flagging activity that deviates from usual activity or predefined levels.
API Security Posture Challenges
Large and diverse API ecosystems complicate API posture management significantly, making it difficult to develop comprehensive security controls that cover the entire organization.
This is often the result of API sprawl – the spread of APIs without clear oversight and strategies in place to ensure they follow adequate security protocols and regulations. API sprawl leads to undocumented, unmanaged, and unsecured APIs used across the organization, lowering your security posture and making it easier for attackers to compromise your systems.
To prevent API sprawl, you need proper API governance structures in place to guarantee that different departments follow API security best practices during development. Additionally, you need effective API security tools to quickly identify instances of unmanaged APIs being used.
Another common challenge affecting API security posture is API drift – changes being made without documentation or fully considering the potential security considerations. API drift creates discrepancies, leading to broken integrations, misconfigurations, operational inefficiency, and additional risk.
API posture management strategies must include drift considerations, such as emphasizing the importance of documentation and finding ways to automate it so that your APIs behave as expected and don’t introduce unexpected vulnerabilities.
Best Practices for Effective API Security
By following API security best practices, you can simplify posture management, eliminate vulnerabilities, and minimize the success rate of cyberattacks targeting your APIs.
API security best practices to focus on include:
- Implement authentication and authorization: Develop and install proper processes to manage access to your APIs. Consider utilizing multi-factor authentication and aligning authorization procedures with zero trust frameworks.
- Use SSL/TLS encryption: Protect your corporate information by authenticating web servers and encrypting API traffic. Encryption ensures intercepted data does not reveal business secrets or sensitive data.
- Implement zero trust access control: Give users least privilege access controls and validate each request. Strict zero trust access management for APIs limits the impact of stolen credentials.
- Conduct regular security tests and risk assessments: Test your APIs to ensure they remain protected and behave as expected (prevent API drift). Up-to-date risk assessments also allow you to better manage your API security resources.
- Update regularly and patch vulnerabilities quickly: Ensure new exploits are removed from your API codebase before an attacker can target them.
- Monitor and alert on anomalous activity: Continuously track API activity and incorporate tools to spot unusual request patterns that could signal an attack.
- 쓰다 API gateways: Sitting between APIs and the end users, API gateways can provide crucial security capabilities, including rate limiting, request filtering, and management of API keys.
- Use a WAAP solution: Combine dedicated web application and API protections into a single solution to identify and block attacks and provide other critical security capabilities (encryption, access management, etc.).
API Posture Management made Easy with CloudGuard WAF
CloudGuard WAF from Check Point offers vital API posture management functionality to identify, assess, protect, test, and monitor your API ecosystem.
With AI-powered analytics to accurately identify suspicious behavior, comprehensive AI discovery and analysis, and continuous monitoring to track changes and prevent drift, CloudGuard combines everything you need for robust and meaningful API posture management.
Learn more about CloudGuard by downloading the GigaOm 2024 Radar Report, where it secured a leading position across various cloud security categories. Or book a free demo today and start seeing what CloudGuard looks like in action.
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