• 08 July, 2021
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API Security For The Modern Enterprise

In today's cloud-based enterprise, APIs are an essential part of every business. They are widely used to promote faster application development, and without proper security measures, sensitive data can easily fall into the wrong hands.

As modern organizations become increasingly dependent on APIs to achieve their goals, their API security strategy must be up-to-date and in line with recent technological developments. API security is an important aspect of the API lifecycle that ensures that the API and its data are protected against various threats. This includes protection against unauthorized access, denial of service, data leaks and other security breaches. It's not just about protecting data from theft or misuse; it also helps protect against potential vulnerabilities that could damage reputation.

The API Security Landscape is Complex API security is quite different from other standard cyber threats due to its ever-changing nature, the shortcomings of left-shift tactics, and the challenge of weak, slow attacks. According to a recent report from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021, the average number of APIs per company increased by 221% in 12 months and API attack traffic increased by 681% while the overall traffic of API increased by 321%. Microservices architecture has created a security blind spot Microservices are small, modular, independent services that can be independently deployed, scaled, and updated. They offer many advantages over traditional monolithic applications: they are more scalable, agile, and have lower maintenance costs, but a negative side effect of microservices architectures is that they create an environment in which attackers can easily find targets according to their size.

Microservices communicate through APIs. When multiple services communicate with each other through APIs, your entire system is exposed when a service is hacked. Internal APIs or Private APIs Are Not Immune Internal APIs are just as vulnerable to attacks, data breaches, and fraud as public APIs. An attacker could use an internal API to launch DDoS attacks against businesses by sending large volumes of traffic over a short period of time. An internal API can allow a malicious actor to access data from another company's API that you use in your application. Or, if you are using an external API for authentication, your authentication token could be stolen by an attacker who gained access to the server hosting this external service via other means such as social engineering or brute force attacks on their account credentials. (for example, guessing a password). API security must be a top priority for the modern enterprise There is no getting around it – API security is a shared responsibility.

It's not just about securing your access controls, but also ensuring that you keep up with changes in the industry and stay ahead of any threats that may arise. Security as an end-to-end process requires comprehensive measures in all aspects of your API strategy, from designing secure APIs from day one, to testing and monitoring throughout their lifetime. lifecycle (and beyond), all the way to maintaining audit trails and making sure your users don't abuse them. The best way to secure an API is to design it with security in mind from the start. This means understanding what threats may exist, what data needs to be protected, how the API will be used, and how it will interact with other systems. It also means defining policies that define acceptable use of the API, including who can access it and under what circumstances. This means that everyone who works with APIs must take an active role in ensuring their security: developers who create additional applications or services; administrators managing their infrastructure; system administrators making sure everything is running smoothly on both sides; security professionals on the lookout for threats, both internal and external (such as hackers). API Security Tools Tools like two-factor authentication, rate limiting, and DDoS protection can go a long way in securing APIs.

Two-factor authentication helps add a layer of security to your API. Rate limiting limits the number of requests per second that an application makes to an API while still being able to make requests as needed. DDoS protection protects against attacks where many people simultaneously attempt to gain information from servers by flooding them with data packets; these floods overwhelm the servers' resources so much that they freeze under the strain and completely stop responding properly. DDoS protection can also protect against other types of attacks such as SQL injection attacks that involve entering malicious code into databases where it would otherwise cause data integrity issues in those databases.