Securing your APIs – The Production Stage

Introduction

This is the last of a three-part blog about the importance of the full-lifecycle approach for API security.

Our previous posts covered the development and testing stages. This final part addresses the production stage.

Is Production Security Necessary?

You might think: “Why do I need API security in production? My code is perfectly safe after testing, so there aren’t any vulnerabilities for attackers to exploit.”
Unfortunately, that approach to security is not enough.

Some vulnerabilities only emerge in production in real-time. For example:

• Logic-based weaknesses: Development-time activities help find vulnerabilities, including security best practices, application scanning, and other testing efforts. But they are still not able to find the unique logic-based weaknesses most commonly found in APIs when they are called in production. Therefore testing cannot eliminate all vulnerabilities.
• Unrealistic expectations: Many organizations rely on DevOps and efforts in development to create less vulnerable code. However, DevOps teams cannot realistically eliminate all vulnerabilities before production deployment. In addition, tight delivery schedules imposed to preserve release deadlines limit many dev-time security efforts.
• Combinations of APIs: Modern applications often include a variety of APIs. Each API employs unique logic that comes with different vulnerabilities. Most of these vulnerabilities only emerge in production when APIs work together in a fully integrated system.
• Keeping track: It is difficult to monitor your APIs across platforms, environments, teams, and applications. As a result, your company will inevitably release APIs with flaws, many of which can only be discovered at production or in intensive log reviews. Production protection is therefore critical for quickly identifying vulnerabilities and data exposures, as well as detecting and preventing attacks.

APIs are your organization’s most vulnerable entry point and can only be protected with visibility and contextual analysis. To combat those risks, you must have a process for discovering all production APIs that will also discover, analyze, and protect them through their entire lifecycle.

That process will help you:

1. Discover APIs in sync with development.
2. Detect, alert, and prevent API abuses and vulnerabilities.
3. Distinguish threats from usual behavior in real-time.
4. Remediate vulnerabilities and risks in production.

Wib API Traffic Inspection

You need to analyze all API activity to establish a baseline for usual behavior and detect any activity that deviates from it. By integrating big data, AI, and ML, Wib’s API message inspection capabilities can acquire the necessary context to avoid API attacks and identify vulnerabilities in real-time.

Features:

• Discovers API endpoints and parameters
• Automatically recognizes different protocols/formats and applies a chain of parsers
• Understands specific API logic
• Monitors and analyzes traffic and identifies suspicious activity
• Offers remediations for found vulnerabilities

Wib API Compliance Defender

Wib helps identify and solve compliance breaches through your APIs in real-time. It protects sensitive data from attacks and abuse in real-time, keeping you in line with all major compliance types.

• Discover APIs compliance issues in sync with development.
• Receive insights and reports for compliance regulations, such as HIPAA, FERPA, PCI, Open Banking, PSD2, GLBA, GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and more.
• Identify non-compliant APIs in real-time with alerts.
• Detect sensitive information that APIs should not display.
• Remediate vulnerabilities and risks in production.

The Gartner report “How to Build an Effective API Security Strategy” states that “by 2022, API abuses will be the most frequent attack vector resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications.” To protect yourself against API attacks, Gartner recommends adopting “a continuous approach to API security across the API development and delivery cycle, designing security [directly] into APIs.”

Wib ensures that your organization establishes a continuous improvement and efficiency model for API security by providing complete visibility and insights for identifying, prioritizing, and eliminating vulnerabilities. As a result, it prevents recurring errors and keeps your user’s data safe.

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