API security becomes the essential cybersecurity aspect that organizations often mishandle or ignore. It potentially creates huge cybersecurity gaps in an organization’s infrastructure.
According to a recent report on API security, the overall API traffic per customer exhibited a 168% increase in Q3 2022, of which around 2.1% constitutes malicious traffic.
It isn’t that organizations aren’t putting in the effort to fix security issues. The increased integration of different APIs has made it difficult for IT teams to address each and every vulnerability. In addition, the abundance of malicious exploits against trivial issues risks API security and exposes customer data.
They may struggle to afford recurrent damages to their credibility and integrity following repeated cyberattacks. Therefore, you must ensure the remediation of your networks’ most common and severe API security threats. This blog highlights some of the common API security gaps and their potential solutions.
Top API Security Risks to Watch Out For
1. Shadow APIs and Zombie APIs
As mentioned above, API use in the corporate sector has increased immensely. This has consequently created API security gaps. Shadow APIs are the prime example of this hypothesis. Due to the abundance of varying APIs, you might often fail to keep track of your APIs. Consequently, some APIs often remain unmaintained/updated, thus inviting malicious hackers to utilize publicly available exploits.
Similar to Shadow APIs, Zombie APIs are a security risk to your organization. While they also risk being unmaintained APIs like the former, Zombie APIs typically refers to the older, insecure API versions and may be related to old devices. Since they also escape the attention of security teams, Zombie APIs frequently attract the attention of criminal hackers. Hence, “zombie attacks” remains the most powerful API security threat.
Solution:
Maintaining proper API inventories ensures that no Shadow API or Zombie API exists. Therefore, you must mandate your IT teams to track and monitor all running APIs for unaddressed vulnerabilities, novel glitches, or misconfigurations. You may also utilize automated API security tools like AppTrana for API inventory tracking to facilitate the process. Moreover, all developers and the relevant staff should ensure all APIs are mapped through extensive documentation.
2. Insecure Pagination
Most APIs frequently display a list of available resources to the client for customization. This list may include elements like “users” or “widgets,” which are displayed in an organized ‘paginated’ manner when viewed through a browser. While it sounds helpful, any APIs displaying explicit information about the resources, such as the users’ PII data and the resource lists, give way to data scraping from an adversary. The attacker could scrape the endpoint and extract sensitive information, such as the affected web app’s usage, customers/subscribers’ email lists, and more.
Solution:
You can limit the pagination and resource lists display to avoid data scraping. For instance, one such method is to specify a time period for viewing selected items for a specific resource. Or you may implement API key accesses for the users, limiting the number of times an API key may be used, exceeding which would revoke the access and block the API key.
3. Unauthenticated or Unsecured APIs
Leaving APIs without authentication is common with organizations working with legacy apps. Unauthenticated APIs become a threat when left exposed to the public. While that’s a risk in itself, unauthenticated APIs dealing with sensitive data, such as PII, is an even bigger issue for your organization’s cybersecurity, reputation, and integrity. Such negligence can also create compliance issues.
Solution:
Mandate API authentication to prevent unsolicited or public access to sensitive APIs. While it may not be an inclusive solution (explained in the following section), implementing authentication narrows down a user’s access. It then helps IT officials identify the entry points in case of malicious access attempts. IT teams should also run periodic checks to ensure adequate API security. Especially when upgrading legacy apps or revoking old, unsupported devices associated with those APIs.
4. Authenticated APIs Without Authorization
Ensure API authentication alone isn’t an inclusive solution. Security teams should also implement authorized user access to the APIs to minimize the risks. Having authenticated but unauthorized APIs is another inherent API security risk that IT teams often fail to address. An adversary may exploit such APIs by gaining authenticated access regardless of the user level through various means, such as by enumerating user identifiers.
Solution:
App developers frequently miss checking API authorization since it is related to the app logic. In turn, an authenticated user can perform any intended actions against the API regardless of whether the user should be authorized. So, preventing such unauthorized access requires developers to implement security checks, such as user IDs or creating Access Control Lists to limit otherwise authenticated users from accessing API data not meant for them.
5. Exposed Keys and Data
The third most critical risk in OWASP Top 10 API. Sometimes, developers do not implement limits on the information an API should expose to clients as they leave it to the client-side systems to filter data accordingly. While convenient for developers and clients, it allows malicious users to access and steal unnecessarily exposed data.
Solution:
It should be a general practice to limit data exposure to specified users only. Putting in this effort in the initial stages can prevent threats like data exfiltration and scraping in the long run.
6. Poor or Improper Server Security
Unsecured endpoints can spill huge amounts of data, the abundance of unsecured or misconfigured APIs reflects the huge cybersecurity gaps that organizations should address. This issue often arises when developers fail to deploy basic security measures, such as implementing HTTPS traffic.
Unfortunately, numerous web apps continue supporting HTTP traffic despite the rigorous HTTPS adoption today, exposing sensitive data like API keys. Since web browsers don’t handle APIs, features like HTTPS-redirect cannot ensure any protection here.
Solution:
Adopting an HTTPS-only-like approach is the key to preventing accidental data exposure. Developers must necessarily implement SSL to encrypt data and block HTTP requests (can be done via the load balancer).
7. Insufficient API Logging
Improper or insufficient API logging is also among the top 10 OWASP API security risks. Like the other security issues explained above, insufficient API monitoring is also attributed to human negligence toward API security. Leaving APIs unmonitored gives enough time for potential attackers to establish their access to a compromised API and maintain persistence. Such stealth attacks can lead to financial, reputational, and data losses. According to OWASP, the average time for organizations to detect a breach is about 200+ days, that too, in response to external reports.
Solution:
Dealing with insufficient API monitoring is simple – be more vigilant. Regular API logging shouldn’t remain confined to API requests. Instead, it must cover user behavior analytics and store logs for about a year. Organizations must perform regular audits to ensure adequate API logging and secure log storage.
How To Deal with API Cybersecurity Gaps
API security isn’t a matter of fixing individual vulnerabilities only. Instead, it demands inclusive attention from your IT team. They must focus on addressing the API cybersecurity gaps from a broad view. A single security issue in any critical API could lead to unnecessary data exposure, uninterrupted access to the attackers, and unhindered cost and reputation damages.
Thankfully, it isn’t too late to address your existing API security issues and prevent malicious exploits.
IT security teams can easily manage these activities via different security tools. However, to save time, or if you are unaware or unable to log all APIs, you may also seek assistance from security experts. This option not only assures 24/7 API security monitoring but also empowers your organization to achieve an overall robust API security posture.
