As we stride closer and closer toward a world where published APIs are accessible to virtually anyone, including cybercriminals with malicious intent, the interconnectedness of domains multiplies - adding an additional layer of cybersecurity risk for leaders to manage.
Since the first modern API was launched by Salesforce in the early 2000s, APIs have progressed by leaps and bounds, and consequentially, businesses have become extremely reliant on them. It’s no surprise that APIs have recently become a leading cause of major security breaches when you consider how businesses depend on them to develop new products, enable integrations, expand reach, and most importantly, drive revenue. Gartner® has predicted in multiple reports that APIs will become the most prominent attack vector in 2023.
Has Relying on APIs Driven Security Risk Out of Control?
If you consider the six degrees of separation theory, claiming that no two people on earth are separated by more than six connections (which researchers say is now closer to two with the prevalence of social media), who's to say this same theory can’t apply to the interconnectedness of all entities in the digital world through APIs?
With that theory in mind along with the increasing commonality of API-centric security breaches in recent years, it’s a safe assumption that the more connected the digital world becomes, the easier it is for cyber adversaries to find and exploit a back door – especially when third-party service providers (TPSPs) have access to otherwise private data.
Not only are security leaders challenged with managing their own API security risk, but it’s critical that companies that rely on TPSPs do their due diligence in vetting their vendors’ offensive security, compliance, and incident response practices to minimize risk.
How Does API Security Impact Revenue?
According to Google’s 2022 report on API Security, 62% of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) reported having an API security incident, 77% of which reported that the incidents delayed application rollouts. Out of the organizations that didn’t report API security incidents, 53% of them reported that API security still caused application rollout delays. What does this data suggest?
- Attackers are targeting APIs heavily.
- Attack surfaces are growing fast, and the threat landscape is outpacing the capabilities of legacy API security solutions – and it’s costing businesses money; and
- API penetration testing is a bottleneck in the software development life cycle (SDLC), suggesting that businesses need agile, DevSevOps-centric solutions to minimize API security’s impact on speed to market (STM) and revenue.
How to Manage API Security Risk
While we can’t control how attackers choose to target the APIs we rely on as security leaders, we can control the steps we take to prevent a targeted attack from being successful and continuously educate ourselves about commonly exploited API vulnerabilities.
In October 2022, Gartner® published their ‘Innovation Insight for API Protection’ report, breaking down API security solutions into three components:
- Discovery;
- Posture Management; and
- Runtime Protection.
Everyone knows that cyber breach recovery is extremely expensive, including reputational damage attached to it. If security leaders invest more into offensive API security solutions that fall under the discovery and posture management umbrellas, the odds of having to rely on defensive runtime protection solutions in the event of a cyber incident are minimized.
Managing API security risk at the root of its cause is a safer bet than relying on incident response capabilities. Implementing preventative solutions that fall under the discovery and posture management umbrellas like API penetration testing and vulnerability scanning is a proactive way to manage API vulnerabilities.
There are always going to be vulnerabilities present, but what matters most when it comes to API security risk management is who finds it first. If security leaders don’t seek out these vulnerabilities themselves, the truth is, someone else will. Discovering and remediating vulnerabilities with modern, agile solutions presents massive ROI potential by decreasing the exposure windows for said vulnerabilities, reducing time to market (TTM), decreasing mean time to remediate (MTTR), and most of all, minimizing risk – the most promising being API penetration testing.
Why is API Penetration Testing Important?
API penetration testing provides DevOps teams with a hacker’s perspective on technical vulnerabilities and business-logic flaws in their applications to help them discover and remediate any weaknesses that a hacker could exploit to execute a breach. If you look at the high-profile breaches that took place in 2022, many were executed through API vulnerabilities – and in hindsight, could’ve been prevented by agile API penetration testing.
Take the major Twitter breach of 2022 for example – hundreds of millions of users’ data were exposed from a zero-day API vulnerability that could’ve been easily discovered and remediated during an API penetration test. Revisiting the idea that vulnerabilities will always be present to some degree, this breach serves as an unfortunate example of what can happen when a hacker is the first to find a weakness. It’s also just one of many similar breaches to indicate that incorporating API penetration testing into the planning, design, and maintenance stages of the SDLC is critical. If an application is released without proper API security protocols and practices in place, organizations become 100% dependent on their incident response capabilities which is almost never a foolproof plan.
API penetration testing helps organizations stay in control of their security posture throughout, while defensive security strategies, although equally important, are geared towards threat response, putting hackers in the driver’s seat. While both offensive and defensive security practices are important and are both here to stay, prevention is both easier and more cost-effective to manage.
What are the Challenges of API Security Testing?
Traditionally, penetration testing has been a slow, manual, consultancy-based process that could take weeks and sometimes months to execute – especially in enterprise environments. With the growing reliance on APIs businesses must develop and maintain their applications, the legacy API penetration testing solutions on the market have been outrun by the agile, constantly evolving world of DevOps.
The four key problems with the legacy approach to manual API penetration testing:
- It's not scalable.
- It’s not fast enough.
- It's not accurate.
- It's expensive.
With the enormous number of assets security leaders tasked with securing in their modern digital environments, traditional penetration testing approaches create extensive backlog, prolong exposure windows, don’t offer real-time security posture insights, delay application rollouts, carry a high TCO, and so on. The good news is that in recent years, new, cloud-native solutions have entered the marketplace to help fulfill demand for fast, scalable, cost-effective, and accurate pen testing. One of the most prominent solution categories that was born from this pent-up demand for better solutions is Pen Testing as a Service.
What is Pen Testing as a Service (PTaaS)?
Pen Testing as a Service (PTaaS) is a new-wave category of penetration testing services that leverages a human-led, AI-enabled methodology to cut lead times and TCO in half. While the legacy, manual approach to penetration testing is notoriously expensive, time consuming, and lacks scalability, and automated vulnerability scanning lacks accuracy, PTaaS combines the pros of both into one solution. The most innovative penetration testing services on the market use AI and automation not to replace human penetration testers, but to scale their abilities and maximize accuracy.
Modern API Penetration Testing Services
As breach statistics have indicated, enterprises demand agile, scalable API security testing solutions to continuously manage the risks amid the growing threat landscape. A prime example of a modern PTaaS provider that offers API penetration testing services that fit the bill (in addition to web application, mobile, internal and external network, IoT, and cloud pentesting) is BreachLock.
The company is known for its ability to start a pen test within 24 hours and rapidly delivering results 50% faster than competitors. On top of a 4.5-star rating on Gartner Peer Insights, they’ve also been cited by Gartner® for their penetration testing services in multiple reports including the Hype Cycle for Security Operations in both 2021 and 2022 as well as the 'How to Select DevSecOps Tools for Secure Software Delivery’ report in 2023 – but why?
BreachLock is the only full-stack pen testing as a service provider that leverages a hybrid approach with 100% in-house certified pen testers. While crowd-sourcing pen testers is common for PTaaS providers to keep up with demand, the quality assurance and predictability offered by using BreachLock’s certified, in-house talent is unmatched. Take third party security risks out of the equation right away when choosing BreachLock’s deep bench of penetration testing experts enabled with world-class technology and tools.
BreachLock’s human-led pentests offer the advanced technological advantage to deliver unparalleled outcomes. With a zero false-positive guaranteed – their evidence-backed results are delivered and prioritized through an award-winning client portal that makes remediation efficient with DevOps workflow integrations, including Jira, Slack, and Trello. Best of all, to continuously monitor risk, BreachLock’s API penetration testing services come with 12 months of automated scans and retesting benefits. With consolidation of technology and resources to mitigate costs in the current economic downturn of 2023, security leaders can work with one penetration testing vendor as a force multiplier for their security outcomes. With on-demand pentests led by human talent using advanced technology benefits, BreachLock offers value-added penetration testing services that improve security outcomes over time.
Conclusion
Implementing API penetration testing into the SDLC on a continuous basis from a PTaaS approach is critical for organizations wanting to develop and mature their offensive security practices regarding API security. Businesses won’t stop relying on APIs to develop and maintain applications in the foreseeable future, so security leaders must continue evolving their strategies and implementing solutions that can mitigate risk in a digital landscape that is becoming more interconnected by the second.
content person: Seemant Sehgal
Business: BreachLock Inc
Phone: +1 917-779-0009
Email: [email protected]
Address: 276 5th Avenue Suite 704 – 3031 New York NY 10001
