Mitigate the primary API security risks

This post discusses the importance of understanding the motives behind attacks on APIs to effectively secure services. Three types of threat actors that target APIs are identified: opportunistic, sophisticated, and internal. Opportunistic threat actors exploit stolen credentials for financial gain or sensitive data theft, while sophisticated ones use advanced techniques to steal intellectual property and data for ransom. Internal threat actors include disgruntled employees, contractors, and vendors who take advantage of their given access. The top security threats for APIs in 2023 are categorized into three areas: API inventory management, authentication and authorization controls, and resource management. Poor inventory management, inefficient authentication and authorization controls, and unrestricted access to resources are identified as the primary risks. To enhance an API security strategy, teams should document APIs with standard definitions like OpenAPI specifications, use instrumentation for automatic discovery of APIs, implement strong authentication schemes, follow the principle of least privilege, set up rate limiting, and deploy web application firewalls.