What API abuse is + common types
API abuse is the intentional misuse of API functionality in order to bypass security controls, extract unauthorized data, or disrupt services. API abuse is a huge threat with real business impact. It can result in costly resource consumption, downtime of critical services, and theft of business data.
API Security Best Practices [Cheat Sheet]
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API abuse vs. API attacks
Although both pose critical business risks, API abuse and API attacks exploit different mechanisms:
API attacks exploit technical API vulnerabilities with the intent to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data, credentials, or other resources. API attacks are always executed intentionally with the intent to cause harm.
API abuse is a misuse or overuse of legitimate business logic. API abuse can occur in the absence of an API vulnerability, with or without malicious intent.
Let’s explore some ways that API abuse happens.
Business logic abuse
APIs expose application business logic to end users, whether those users are legitimate or malicious. The result? APIs are particularly susceptible to business logic exploits that manipulate normal business functions to get unintended outcomes.
This form of abuse requires a deep understanding of the target API’s design in order to identify and exploit flaws related to normal processes like account creation and item purchase. For example, a malicious actor might leverage an API to create hundreds or thousands of fake accounts in order to claim discounts or account credits reserved for new users.
Data scraping and harvesting
Data scraping (aka data harvesting) occurs when attackers extract large volumes of proprietary logic or customer data from legitimate API endpoints using automated scripts. While APIs normally get a predictable amount of requests and access small, connected datasets, data scraping incidents often involve automated high-rate access patterns and enumeration across unrelated objects/tenants. This data can then be sold on the dark web, help threat actors steal user identities, or be used to undermine the competition.
Data scraping is often facilitated by design flaws like weak access controls and insufficient rate limiting, as was the case in the infamous Facebook data scraping incident.
Credential stuffing and account takeover (ATO)
During credential stuffing attacks, hackers exploit the tendency for password reuse by taking massive lists of stolen credentials (usernames/password pairs), usually sourced on the dark web from past data breaches, and stuffing them through a loginAPI in an attempt to gain unauthorized access to legitimate accounts. From there, threat actors take over the accounts, often changing the credentials so legitimate users no longer have access, and go on to perform fraudulent transactions.
Stopping these attacks is rarely easy. Because API abuse uses the application business logic as designed, it can be difficult to differentiate between legitimate users and abusers. Further, abusers have found clever ways to bypass protections like malicious IP blocking and rate limiting by using distributed botnets or using “low and slow” techniques to spread the abuse over time.
Rate limit evasion and resource exhaustion
Rate limiting controls the in-flow of API requests, and by extension, the amount of resources (like network or CPU) that requests can consume. In addition to exploiting poorly configured rate limiting (e.g., missing execution timeouts), attackers evade rate limiting using techniques like IP address rotation or by using distributed botnets to make requests seem more legitimate. Next, attackers overwhelm APIs through DDoS attacks, straining cloud resources, spiking costs, and degrading performance. This ultimately renders APIs unusable and typically hits bottom lines hard.
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Why is API abuse a critical risk to cloud environments?
It’s hard to spot, operationally disruptive, and costly.
API abuse often mimics legitimate traffic, with attackers using valid credentials and following usual business processes, making detection significantly more difficult than traditional attack patterns.
As a result, the damage is often already done by the time API abuse is detected and defenses are activated, causing crippling operational, reputational, and financial losses, including disrupted business operations, stolen resources, and loss of trust with customers.
It can lead to broader security compromise
Some forms of API abuse, such as credential stuffing on legitimate login APIs, give abusers access to carry out a broader attack. If credential stuffing succeeds, attackers can assume legitimate user identities and use those to compromise customer data and abuse other privileges of customer accounts.
There are compliance and regulatory implications.
When API abuse leads to unauthorized access to customer data or credential theft, it triggers regulatory scrutiny under frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI DSS.
Even if your APIs and data are secure against technical vulnerabilities, in the wake of an attempted breach, regulators often assess audit trails to check that abuse prevention and mitigation mechanisms are in place. Overlooked measures or incomplete audit trails are considered compliance violations, and that means you can expect penalties.
API Security Checklist 2025: OWASP-Aligned, Code-to-Cloud Best Practices
An API checklist serves as a framework to help your security team systematically detect and tackle threats and vulnerabilities throughout the API lifecycle. Its end goal? To strengthen your overall security posture by standardizing API security efforts.
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Detection strategies for API abuse
Behavioral analysis and anomaly detection
Unlike signature-based detection, which depends on predefined rules and known attack signatures, behavioral analysis models catch subtle misuse by continuously analyzing request patterns, timing, and data access behaviors. This allows them to identify deviations from baseline behavior and assess if those deviations signal abuse. API behavioral analysis is a strong use case for AI-based detection.
Real-time monitoring and alerting
Looking to discover abuse early? Implement real-time capture and alerting for threshold breaches of key API monitoring metrics (like request frequency, error rates, latency, and volume of data extracted).
Pro-tip: To accelerate mitigation, send automated alerts to the most convenient locations for developers. IDEs, emails, and communication channels like Slack are great choices.
Attack path analysis across cloud environments
APIs don’t operate in isolation. So, in addition to baseline and real-time monitoring, correlating API monitoring data with cloud security events from other cloud-native monitoring tools provides a complete and contextualized view of your entire environment. This lets security teams see how patterns of behavior unfold across APIs and other cloud resources, allowing them to spot malicious activity where API abuse is just one stage of the attack.
Top API Security Solutions (and how to choose the right one)
In this article, we’ll break down what capabilities a strong API security tool needs to have and look at different categories of API security solutions, plus examples.
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API abuse prevention strategies
Always assume that every API you expose has the potential to be abused. This will help you focus on fixing design loopholes, tightening security controls, eliminating vulnerabilities, and instituting 360-degree monitoring.
Here are other important strategies for preventing and mitigating API abuse:
Implement authentication and authorization
Robust API authentication and authorization are mandatory controls for preventing unauthorized access (e.g., addressing OWASP API Top 10 risks such as Broken Object Level Authorization and Broken Function Level Authorization). See OWASP API Security Top 10.
Key authentication mechanisms
API key management includes secure creation, storage, rotation, and scope/usage limits. Treat API keys as low-assurance; prefer OAuth 2.0/OIDC with short-lived tokens for stronger assurance.
MFA helps protect user-facing authentication flows from ATO/brute-force; for service-to-service APIs, prefer OAuth 2.0/OIDC with short-lived tokens and scopes.
Mutual TLS (mTLS) enforces two-way authentication (client and server), unlike standard TLS, which only authenticates the server.
Token expiration, rotation, and revocation improve session management and keep attackers out.
Key authorization controls
Implement the principle of least privilege (POLP) to prevent privilege escalation.
Enforce role-based access controls (RBAC) and scope-based authorization to restrict access to APIs and operations (limit who can create/use API keys; don’t expose keys broadly).
Keep logs and audit trails so you can track access, monitor usage patterns, and instantly flag suspicious activities.
REST API security: Best practices, risks, and tools
REST API security is the combination of technologies and practices used to safeguard RESTful endpoints from attacks, such as unauthorized access, exploitation, and abuse.
Leggi di piùDeploy adaptive rate limiting and resource management
Adaptive rate limiting leverages ML models to automatically adjust request volume and resource usage based on real-time threat signals. As a result, you’ll contain threats using live context rather than static traffic thresholds—without denying access to legitimate users.
To make the most of adaptive rate limiting:
Define baseline usage patterns to detect suspicious activity.
Integrate threat intelligence to connect anomalies with real-time TTPs.
Establish rules for containing attacks (for instance, block requests from an IP once it spikes beyond a normal volume).
Allocate resources like CPU, memory, and bandwidth on a tiered basis according to service importance, or divide resources among users from various regions. This ensures all services and users aren’t simultaneously denied access during an attack.
Encrypt APIs
When attackers evade authentication and rate limiting, strong API encryption and real-time monitoring help prevent access to data and ensure quick detection. Let's dig into encryption best practices first:
Use TLS 1.2+ and application-layer encryption (ALE) to prevent data exposure by encrypting sensitive fields like request bodies and specific headers.
Use encrypted, time-bound, and signed tokens (e.g., JWE or HMAC) to hide your tokens and mask exploitable information like endpoint names and user roles.
Security monitoring and incident response
You can reduce the chances of API abuse, but there’s always a chance an attacker can sneak through your defenses. That’s why monitoring and incident response are pivotal:
Log access patterns, authentication attempts, errors, resource consumption, and API usage to uncover potential threats.
Use structured logs and keep complete audit trails. Include essential metadata like user IDs, error codes, timestamps, headers, and request and response payloads.
Develop incident response procedures. Identify different API abuse types and scenarios, define prevention and detection mechanisms, establish clear containment strategies, and assign roles and responsibilities.
Zombie APIs: A hidden security risk
Zombie APIs are API endpoints that remain operational despite lacking ongoing maintenance or official support.
Leggi di piùHow Wiz strengthens API abuse prevention across the entire development lifecycle
API abuse is a different breed of attack, executable even in the absence of technical vulnerabilities with high consequences when successful. That’s why you need a platform that offers full visibility across your API estate and the ability to proactively manage your API and cloud security posture together in one place.
Wiz helps you discover APIs, assess their external exposure, and map attack paths from APIs to sensitive data and resources in your cloud:
API Discovery: Automatically and continuously discover APIs agentlessly via cloud connectors, from runtime traffic via the Wiz sensor, via external attack surface scanning, and API specs.
API Risk and Exposure Assessment: Validate API exposure via the Wiz dynamic scanner and test APIs for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations accessible from the external attack surface. Knowing which APIs are exposed can help you understand which APIs are accessible to abusers.
API Toxic Combinations: Leverage the security graph and Wiz’s unified cloud and API context to understand relationships between APIs and other resources in your cloud, so you can identify full attack paths and toxic combinations of risk before an attacker does.
Want to secure your APIs from abuse before attacks come knocking? Get a demo to see Wiz in action.
An agentless, contextual approach to API security
Learn how with Wiz, customers can now simply answer the question of where do I have exposed APIs in my environment with all the context associated with the execution environment.
