Why is API attack surface management important?
Your API attack surface includes all potential attack paths from your APIs to your company’s data, networks, and infrastructure. API attack surface management is how you continuously discover, analyze, and monitor these APIs and paths.
There are several benefits to proactively managing your API attack surface.
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Eliminate API blind spots
API attack surface management is a strategic process that involves inventorying all APIs to get 24/7 visibility into what APIs you have, where they are, how they are configured, and how they expose your organization to risk.
Developers are constantly releasing and modifying APIs, leading to API sprawl. Security teams often lack visibility into all the APIs in their environment. The result? Forgotten “shadow” APIs and zombie APIs that aren’t managed and could be vulnerable.
API attack surface management removes these blind spots through automated API discovery. This visibility is the essential foundation for identifying and mitigating API risks.
Reduce risk
API attack surface management tools automate defense by continuously identifying and remediating security risks across your entire API attack surface. This strengthens your API security posture and neutralizes threats without impeding cloud-native growth or bottlenecking deployment cycles.
Recent high-profile breaches reveal a pattern of common API-related attack vectors:
Exploiting exposed APIs: This often occurs with unmanaged shadow or zombie API endpoints. Attackers are frequently scanning for exposed API endpoints that lack proper authentication controls. Finding an exposed API can give them a foot in the door to further compromise your organization and potentially access sensitive data.
Breaking through API misconfigurations: Alternatively, for monitored APIs, attackers more commonly exploit misconfigurations, break through half-baked authentication and authorization schemes, or abuse business logic in ways that completely bypass traditional security controls.
API attack surface management maps your API attack surface, identifies exposed APIs, analyzes them for vulnerabilities, and uncovers attack paths that could lead to a breach. In other words, it enables proactive threat mitigation.
Maintain regulatory compliance
API attack surface management can also keep you out of trouble with regulations like GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and CCPA—all of which have strict data protection requirements and hefty non-compliance fines in the event of a data breach.
Data breaches that tank stock prices, compliance violations with seven-figure penalties, and service disruptions that destroy customer trust are all risks that can arise if you don't get API attack surface management right.
Achieve operational resilience
Because APIs power essential services in applications like logins and payments, they handle sensitive data. This means that the business impacts of API security failures are potentially catastrophic, e.g., the tanking stock prices and customer-alienating downtime mentioned above.
API attack surface management is a powerful way to keep these consequences at bay.
Core components of API attack surface management
When managing your API attack surface, there are three primary components you need to take into account.
Automated API discovery and inventory
In the cloud, development velocity is a given—services and corresponding API endpoints are created and terminated constantly, making manual tracking unrealistic and error-prone.
Automating the identification and cataloging of APIs as they’re spun up and destroyed reduces errors and provides real-time API status updates. It also ensures no API is missed, as any overlooked or shadow APIs expose businesses to risks like unauthorized access, data breaches, and compliance failures.
What methods will you need to rely on?
Businesses should ideally deploy the following automated API discovery methods to leave no APIs undetected throughout their SDLC:
Traffic analysis: Scanning north-south and east-west traffic to discover API calls and the APIs/services they originated from; integrations with web application firewall (WAF) and API gateway tools to provide broad coverage for traffic analysis
Source code scanning: Analyzing source code and code repos for APIs before they go live
Infrastructure configuration parsing: Scanning infrastructure config files in web servers and cloud resources to find API endpoints and various request types/data structures used by APIs
Runtime workload monitoring: Identifying API calls at runtime to identify active API endpoints; typically achieved via a sensor deployed on a cloud workload
API specification discovery: Automatically scouring your source code and CI/CD pipelines via a built-in inventory system to find those precious OpenAPI or AsyncAPI specs, i.e., a perfectly accurate list of endpoints, methods, and parameters
Since APIs evolve rapidly, continuous discovery is key; point-in-time assessments leave blind spots, undermining thorough attack surface coverage.
Risk assessment and vulnerability analysis
Once all APIs are inventoried, the next step is scanning for risks and vulnerabilities, e.g., broken object-level authorization (BOLA), excessive data exposure, improper inventory management, and other OWASP Top 10 API security risks.
Traditional vulnerability scanners often lack the nuanced context to detect API abuse and subtle attacks like parameter tampering or chained vulnerabilities.
API attack surface management platforms, however, incorporate evolving attack tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to uncover API vulnerabilities and logical flaws that lead to incidents and abuse. This requires real-time threat data to:
Monitor API changes, including new deployments and deprecated APIs
Map API configurations to existing policies to flag drift
Validate authentication mechanisms like JWT validation and mutual TLS (mTLS) against threats
Model data flows to flag business logic flaws like BOLA and excessive data exposure
Prioritize vulnerabilities to concentrate remediation efforts on high-impact risks
Context you can’t afford to miss
When it comes to risk prioritization, CVSS isn’t enough. It misses out on critical context like:
Network exposure: Are the APIs internal or public-facing?
Data sensitivity: Which APIs are transmitting sensitive vs. non-sensitive data, and what are the business and compliance risks of such data getting exposed?
Privilege levels: Are there any admin-level privileges in/around the API endpoint?
Potential attack paths: Are there any entry points, toxic combinations, or vulnerability chains that attackers can exploit to move laterally?
This means businesses must choose API attack surface management tools that support contextual risk scoring, i.e., prioritization based on business impact, exploitation in the wild (EPSS), and other essential context.
Continuous monitoring and threat detection
Even when vulnerabilities are continuously detected, it’s often impossible to fix them all instantly. This is where cloud detection and response (CDR) tools come into play, correlating API runtime behavior across dynamic scenarios with live threat data to spot and contain attacks before any real damage is done.
These solutions feature:
Real-time anomaly detection: Spotting deviation from behavioral baselines, e.g., unusual POST payloads could signify potential SQLi attacks.
Threat correlation with context: Correlating API logs and events with other cloud monitoring data (e.g., mapping API calls from an admin account to suspicious object storage access outside of business hours) can expose a compromised privileged account being used in a data exfiltration attempt.
Automated policy enforcement: Stopping non-compliant IaC and PaC changes, blocking malicious traffic, etc.
The API attack surface management process loop
Continuous monitoring is not an isolated action. The entire API attack surface management process must be a properly integrated loop:
Automatically and continuously discover and inventory APIs ➡️ Trigger the assessment and contextual risk scoring of all inventoried APIs ➡️ Remediate high-priority risks to reduce exposure ➡️ Activate continuous threat and vulnerability monitoring
Skip one component of this loop, and your API attack surface management falters.
What does API attack surface management entail?
Automated discovery, risk assessment, proactive remediation, and continuous monitoring make up the API attack surface management lifecycle.
To start an API attack surface management practice in your organization, you must first understand the complexities of your cloud footprint, choose the right tools, and set up internal processes and procedures.
Cloud-native deployment patterns
Securing APIs in the cloud, while autoscaling, load-balancing, and achieving DevOps velocity, is challenging enough. But many organizations deploy workloads across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, leading to environment sprawl that can bottleneck API attack surface management
For example, in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, mapping APIs distributed across cloud and on-premises or across multiple providers with different security models and configurations presents various hurdles:
How can you ensure you’re collecting data in all the right places to get a complete inventory of your APIs?
How can you unify that information in a single view?
How can you ensure that API configuration policies are applied consistently across your organization?
These architectural complexities necessitate certain measures:
Data unification: Discovering APIs in each environment, then providing a single-pane-of-glass view of API monitoring data across the entire attack surface
Policy-as-code (PaC) enforcement: Implementing PaC to ensure API configuration consistency across environments without compromising velocity
Integrating API security with developer workflows
To eliminate risks as early as possible in the API development lifecycle, API attack surface management must be integrated into CI/CD pipelines. This ensures risks are discovered and resolved before fixing them becomes more costly.
Measures required here include:
Applying a shift-left approach so that risks are flagged before deployment to minimize exposure in production
Choosing tools that speed up issue detection and resolution by providing security feedback directly within developer workflows through:
IDE integrations to alert developers to insecure code within their development environments
Pull request analysis to block vulnerable merges or PaC violations
Automated security gates to isolate/block non-compliant APIs in deployment pipelines
Selecting platforms that provide actionable, contextual security guidance (not overwhelming alert volumes) to minimize toil and speed up incident response
How Wiz supports comprehensive API attack surface management
Wiz supports multiple deployment options (agent-based and agentless) to deliver the most comprehensive visibility and flexibility for your specific environment:
You get complete visibility, not just for API attack surface management but also for managing the security posture of your cloud resources, workloads, data, runtime, and more.
Wiz correlates insights across complex environments, mapping attack paths and toxic combinations via the Wiz Security Graph, which shows security teams how API vulnerabilities escalate risks in the broader cloud context, or vice versa.
Wiz scans your attack surface to identify exposed APIs. When we identify an API exposure, we dynamically test the API for API misconfigurations and vulnerabilities. This allows us to identify exploitable risks and connect them to attack paths in your cloud, so you can prioritize remediation for the riskiest APIs.
The platform’s code-to-runtime traceability makes remediation a cinch. Teams can trace vulnerabilities from runtime all the way back to the exact line of code that introduced them. Wiz then supplies remediation guidelines and code fixes that democratize and accelerate vulnerability resolution.
Want to learn more about how Wiz extends API attack surface management to your entire cloud ecosystem? See it in action for yourself. Sign up for a demo today.
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