It’s no secret that data breaches have become a major concern for both citizens and institutions around the world. These can cause significant damage to an organization’s reputation, cause significant financial losses, and even have significant legal repercussions. From the infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal to the Equifax data breach, there have been some pretty high-profile breaches that have impacted some of the world’s biggest brands.
A breach can also have a significant impact on individuals, ultimately leading to the loss of personal information such as passwords and credit card details, which criminals can use for malicious purposes. Most notably, it leaves victims vulnerable to identity theft and financial fraud.
Given the sheer volume of these leaks, one might imagine that the world would stop and take note of the attack vectors being exploited. The unfortunate reality is that the world didn’t stand still. Even more interestingly, the most prominent attack vectors may not be what you or others think. Believe it or not, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a leading source of leaks and compromises.
Yes, hackers are increasingly abusing APIs to access and leak sensitive data. In 2022 alone, 76% of his cybersecurity professionals admitted to having experienced API security-related incidents. Even if it didn’t get enough attention, US companies lost more than $23 billion to API-related breaches over the same period. And unfortunately, many organizations are just beginning to realize.
With that said, this article explores the potential impact of data breaches, the role and impact APIs have, and how organizations can protect themselves from these risks.
Protecting data passing through APIs
If you work in the IT industry, it’s clear how important security controls are to prevent sensitive data from being exposed or leaked. As such, organizations should take additional measures to protect their data from unauthorized access. Companies should invest in the latest security measures and ensure that all employees are aware of the importance of protecting confidential information. If you haven’t got the big picture yet, this exercise should definitely include investing in API security.
Astonishing to many technology professionals, API traffic now accounts for over 80% of internet traffic, and API calls are growing twice as fast as HTML traffic. Unpacking this statistic quickly reveals that APIs are interacting with all kinds of data, including sensitive data such as credit card information, medical records, and social security numbers. However, much less attention is paid to securing APIs. Network, perimeter and application security. Let’s be honest, many organizations have a hard time even keeping track of how many APIs they actually have.
Pretty alarming, right? As the old saying goes, you can’t protect what you can’t see. And without an accurate API inventory and insight into sensitive data traffic, potential vulnerabilities and data breaches cannot be adequately addressed.
API gateways and web application firewalls (WAFs) only expose API traffic routed through them, so you have limited visibility into your API assets. Also keep in mind that the API inventory is more than just a number. You need to know how many APIs you have, including shadow and zombie APIs, and what kind of data they interact with. This is another drawback of WAFs and gateways. They just don’t give you visibility into the types of sensitive data that pass through your API. Without it, the consequences can be disastrous if sensitive data is leaked.
Adherence to compliance regulations
Given the increasing amount of data being collected and stored, meeting data compliance regulations is equally important to protecting sensitive data. This may sound a bit strange given how interdependent both practices are, but data compliance covers a wide range of topics such as privacy policies, data security measures and customer rights. .
To address variables such as industry, geography, and data type, regulators around the world have enacted and continually expanded requirements on how organizations handle sensitive information, including GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and CCPA. I’m here.
Complying with these regulations helps protect customer privacy, prevent data breaches, and ensure that the data collected is secure and protected from unauthorized access and misuse. In short, knowing where your data is stored, moved to, and accessed from is critical to ensuring compliance and avoiding costly fines.
APIs play an important role here as well. APIs are the connective tissue between applications and devices. Your organization’s sensitive data passes through APIs whether you realize it or not. Unfortunately, the idea of staying compliant within an organization is still considered a legacy infrastructure-only endeavor. Business and IT leaders must pivot quickly as the advent of APIs takes compliance into a whole new dimension. API visibility should be paramount, as exfiltration of sensitive data can lead to major compliance violations.
How to protect APIs and sensitive data
Traditional application security solutions have become the cornerstone of the cybersecurity stack. However, despite their track record of success, APIs present inherent security challenges that these solutions cannot address. As explained earlier, API gateways and WAFs only provide visibility into API traffic passing through them.
Using the right tools requires investing in API security controls throughout the software development lifecycle to ensure APIs are protected from code to production. If you’re serious about protecting sensitive data and complying with data privacy regulations, this is the only tangible strategy. The four pillars that make up a purpose-built API security platform are API discovery, posture management, runtime protection, and API security testing. Let’s take a quick look at each feature and how they can help protect sensitive data.
- API discovery: API Discovery allows you to identify and inventory all your APIs across all your data sources and environments.
- Posture management: Posture Management provides a comprehensive view of traffic, code, and configuration to assess an organization’s API security posture. It also identifies any form of sensitive data moving through the API.
- runtime protection: Run-time tools that leverage AI and ML-based monitoring to detect anomalies and potential threats in API traffic and drive remediation based on pre-selected incident response policies.
- API security test: API security testing aims to eliminate vulnerabilities and reduce risk before production, thereby strengthening your compliance program.
As you can see, full control over sensitive data requires a comprehensive API security platform. However, it can also be a little overwhelming. That said, it’s a good place to start by learning more about posture management. Given that this aspect is where personally identifiable information (PII) is sorted and organized, it’s probably the best place to start. Get started by downloading a free copy of The Definitive Guide to API Posture Management.
