Prediction #5: Application Programming Interfaces (API) Will Be Exposed as The Weakest Link Leading to Cloud-Native Threats

By Sekhar Sarukkai, VP engineering and cloud security, McAfee

Credit: ID 115146030 © Tawatdchai Muelae | Dreamstime.com

A recent study showed that more than three in four organizations treat API security differently than web app security, indicating API security readiness lags behind other aspects of application security. The study also showed that more than two-thirds of organizations expose APIs to the public to enable partners and external developers to tap into their software platforms and app ecosystems.

APIs are an essential tool in today’s app ecosystem including cloud environments, IoT, microservices, mobile, and Web-based customer-client communications. Dependence on APIs will further accelerate with a growing ecosystem of cloud applications built as reusable components for back-office automation (such as with Robotic Process Automation) and growth in the ecosystem of applications that leverage APIs of cloud services such as Office 365 and Salesforce. 

Threat actors are following the growing number of organizations using API-enabled apps because APIs continue to be an easy – and vulnerable – means to access a treasure trove of sensitive data. Despite the fallout of large-scale breaches and ongoing threats, APIs often still reside outside of the application security infrastructure and are ignored by security processes and teams. Vulnerabilities will continue to include broken authorization and authentication functions, excessive data exposure, and a failure to focus on rate limiting and resource limiting attacks. Insecure consumption-based APIs without strict rate limits are among the most vulnerable.

Headlines reporting API-based breaches will continue into 2020, affecting high-profile apps in social media, peer-to-peer, messaging, financial processes, and others, adding to the hundreds of millions of transactions and user profiles that have been scraped in the past two years. The increasing need and hurried pace of organizations adopting APIs for their applications in 2020 will expose API security as the weakest link leading to cloud-native threats, putting user privacy and data at risk until security strategies mature.

Organizations seeking improvement in their API security strategy should pursue a more complete understanding of their Cloud Service APIs through comprehensive discovery across SaaS, PaaS and IaaS environments, implement policy-based authorization, and explore User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) technology to detect anomalous access patterns.

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